How to find saved links and posts on Facebook
Facebook's Saved section holds more than videos. Links, photos, Marketplace listings, events and plain posts all land in the same place — and because that place has filters but no search, the more varieties you keep the harder any one of them is to retrieve.
Here is how to reach each kind, and what to do when the one you want is not there any more.
Getting to Saved
On the web: facebook.com/saved. In the app: the menu — the three
horizontal lines — then Saved, sometimes behind "See more" if your menu is
crowded.
The list is newest first. Down the side, or across the top on mobile, are filters by type. Those filters are the entire retrieval mechanism: there is no text search inside your saved items, so whatever you are looking for, the plan is always "filter to the right type, then scroll".
Saved links
Filter to Links. This is where an external site or a news story ends up — anything whose destination is off Facebook.
Two things to know. A link saved from a post keeps the post as its context, so if the post is deleted the entry can go with it even though the destination website is perfectly fine. And the preview image and headline are cached from whenever the post was made — a link whose site has since been redesigned may show a preview that no longer matches anything.
Saved posts with no particular type
A text post, a status, a long update from a group: filter to Posts. This is usually the largest and least useful category, because a text post has no thumbnail, so the list gives you the first line and the author and nothing else to recognise it by.
Collections, if you were organised in advance
You can put a saved item into a collection at the moment you save it, or afterwards from the item's menu. Collections are the closest Facebook gets to folders and they work well — for anything you have already sorted.
Like any organise-as-you-go feature, it only helps if you guessed right about where you would come looking. Most people's saved sections are one enormous unsorted pile with three collections at the top, made during a burst of enthusiasm in 2019.
Download Your Information
Facebook will export your saved items. Go to Settings, then "Your information", then "Download your information", and choose the saved items category. Pick JSON if anything else is going to read the file; HTML if you only want to look at it yourself.
Be clear about what arrives: a list of links, not the content. Every entry points back at the original post. Opening one needs you to be signed in, and if the post has been deleted the link goes nowhere. It is an index of what you kept, not a copy of it.
It is still worth having. It is the only way to get the whole list out in one piece, and something else can read it, which matters for the next part.
When the thing you saved is gone
Every method above assumes the original post still exists. Often it does not. Posts get deleted, accounts get deactivated, groups get archived, videos get removed for copyright — and none of that notifies you. Your saved list quietly stops being a list of things you can open.
There is one way around it: keep your own copy instead of a pointer to somebody else's.
That is what AllMySaves does. Give it a Facebook export and it will fetch what is still reachable — before more of it stops being reachable — and keep your own copy of each one. It transcribes what is said in every video, so the archive is searchable by a phrase you remember rather than by scrolling. And when an original disappears afterwards, your copy stays, with the card telling you the original is gone.
The part Facebook's own Saved section cannot offer is the simple one: search.