When you delete posts or stories on Instagram, you might experience some kind of “delete regret”. The good news now is that the platform will have a Recently Deleted section where all the things you (or someone else) deleted will be stored for 30 days and you can restore them any time within that period in case you decide to un-delete them. This is a useful feature as well for those accounts that may have been hacked by someone who inadvertently deleted some of their posts.
Instagram says this new Recently Deleted section lets users review and restore those posts and stories that they have, well, recently deleted. But it also serves as a sort-of protection against those hackers who may compromise your account. A lot of these hackers go on a deleting spree and those who are content creators are devastated that their carefully curated content have suddenly disappeared. Well, unless they backed it up or something but that’s still a hassle.
Now all of your deleted posts and stories (except those that have been archived) will be put into a Recently Deleted folder that you can access in your Settings > Account. They will all stay there for the next 30 days. This includes photos, videos, reels, IGTV videos, and stories. After 30 days, they will be automatically deleted forever. You can choose to restore them or even permanently delete things before the 30 days are up.
But to protect those that have been hacked, Instagram will verify first that you are the rightful account holder when you’re trying to restore or permanently delete content from the Recently Deleted section. If the person cannot prove that he/she is the account holder, there will probably be some alert that the account has been compromised. Instagram didn’t really explain what would happen but we assume it will be something like that.
Instagram says they have started rolling out this feature to users. But it doesn’t seem to be available for everyone just yet so you’ll have to wait for it to come to your account and just be careful about deleting posts for now.