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Feeling remorseful? Just undo it!
A common conundrum for users of pretty much all forms of social media is the desire to edit or delete something they’ve already posted, but a secondary concern is restoring something that’s been deleted. Maybe you accidentally fat-fingered the delete button, maybe your friend really wants you to have their post in your timeline, or maybe your hot take wasn’t as hot as you originally thought it was. Whatever the reason, more social platforms don’t allow this, but now there’s at least one.
In a new update to the Android version of the Instagram app, you now have the ability to restore any content you’ve deleted from your timeline back to its original place. This is accomplished through a new “recently deleted” folder located under your account settings. This folder contains all posts that you’ve deleted within the last 30 days. Anything older than 30 days will be deleted for good, but if you decide to bring something back, you can retrieve it from the folder to restore it to your timeline. The only caveat with this service is that only regular posts are saved for 30 days. Story posts, on the other hand, will only remain in the folder for 24 hours before they’re gonezo.
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Instagram is marketing this new update as a means of salvaging accounts in the event of a hack. If someone were to hack your account and delete all of your posts, you could use this feature to get everything back, assuming you’re able to restore ownership of your account within a month. Don’t worry, you’ll need to confirm your identity to permanently delete or restore anything, so a hacker, ideally, wouldn’t be able to take control of that feature.
