Recover tweet drafts made on an iPhone

October 10, 2022 3:30 PM

Hi, I made some long tweet thread drafts and I spent hours and would really like to recover them - I had logged out and logged back in so they seem to be gone but they’re evidently in a cache? Am on iPhone.
posted by The Last Sockpuppet to Technology (2 answers total)

Can you clarify where you are hitting the problem? To save a draft, you normally type a tweet (or a thread of them), then hit "Cancel" and then choose "Save Draft." This saves your tweet or tweet thread in your drafts.

Assuming you did that, you should be able to resume your thread, edit it, and send it by the following steps:

1) Tap the Tweet button (which, in the Twitter app version I'm using on my iPhone is a white + sign in a medium-ish blue circle located in the the lower right, slightly above the row of icons on the bottom) as if you were going to write a new tweet.

2) On the resulting screen, you can type any new tweet OR tap "Drafts" in the upper right (just to the left of the blue Tweet button -- which will be somewhat greyed out if you haven't typed anything).

3) Once you tap "Drafts," Twitter will present you with a list of all of your drafted, unsent Tweets. You should see the first of your tweets from your thread. Tap it.

Now you should be back to where you started, as if you'd never logged out, with all of your threaded tweets displayed. You can write more, and then save the revised thread. Drafts will stay unsent in your drafts until you send them. I've got drafts from years ago.

Note: if you did NOT save your threaded tweets before logging out, they will usually be inaccessible. Twitter generally only saves drafts if you manually save them (by clicking "Cancel" and then "Save draft") of if there's a failure when attempting to send, at which point it will safe a failed tweet as a draft. Logging out generally clears anything you haven't already saved.

Have you gone through this process and encountered an obstacle?
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 9:58 PM on October 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks so much! I had logged out, so it cleared my saved drafts from the cache. Shortly after an expletive-laced panic, I found an app named Chirr, which automagically made new threads for me. I will be using Chirr from now on to do these mega threads.
posted by The Last Sockpuppet at 7:34 AM on October 12, 2022