Instagram stories are a great way to share moments of your life with your followers.
You can either take a picture or a 15-second long video and add it to your story for your followers to see.
Instagram stories will be automatically deleted after 24 hours.
If you don’t want to wait for 24 hours, you can manually delete it from your profile.
At times, you might regret posting a story and delete it later on.
However, if you forgot to save it, you might not know how to recover it.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to recover deleted Instagram stories in 3 easy steps.
How to recover deleted Instagram stories
To recover deleted Instagram stories, you need to navigate to your stories archive.
Once you’re on your stories archive, find the story that you want to recover and save it.
Saving the archived story will save it into your photo gallery.
You can also re-share the archived story on your profile.
Re-sharing the story will automatically include a “Memories” caption along with the date of it.
You can also delete the caption if you don’t want it by dragging and dropping it into the trash icon.
However, do note that you can only recover Instagram stories that have been automatically deleted after a 24-hour period.
If you manually deleted an Instagram story, you may not be able to find it in your stories archive.
That being said, below is a step-by-step guide on how you can recover deleted Instagram stories.
- Step 1: Navigate to “Archive”
- Step 2: Tap on the story that you want to recover
- Step 3: Save the photo or video
Step 1: Navigate to “Archive”
Open Instagram > navigate to your profile > menu > Archive.
The first step is to navigate to your Instagram archives.
To begin with, open the Instagram app on your mobile device.
Do not use Instagram on a desktop as you won’t be able to access your archives there.
Once you’re on Instagram, tap on your profile icon on the bottom navigation bar.
After you’ve tapped on your profile icon, you’ll land on your Instagram profile.
On the top of your profile, you’ll see a menu icon.
Tap on the menu icon to open the menu.
On the menu, you’ll see several options including settings, archive, your activity, and more.
The settings page allows you to customize your settings such as your notifications, privacy, and security.
On the other hand, the “Archive” page allows you to see your archived posts, past stories, and live streams.
Tap on “Archive” to go to your Instagram archive.
Proceed to the next step to learn how to find your past Instagram stories.
Step 2: Tap on the story that you want to recover
Stories archive > navigate to the past story that you want to recover.
After you’ve tapped on “Archive”, you’ll land on the archive page.
There are three archive pages including the stories archive, posts archive, and live archive.
The stories archive allows you to see your past Instagram stories.
The posts archive shows all the posts that you’ve archived.
Lastly, the live archive shows your past live streams on Instagram.
If you aren’t on the “Stories archive” page, tap on the dropdown arrow on the top navigation bar.
Then, select “Stories archive” out of the three options.
After you’ve selected “Stories archive”, you’ll see a grid list of all your past Instagram stories.
These stories are categorized by newest first, so if you want to find an older story, you have to scroll up.
You’ll be able to tell the exact time that you’ve posted the story by looking at the date tag on the left corner of each story.
Find the story that you want to recover and tap on it to view it.
If you’re unable to find the story, it means that you might have manually deleted it.
If that’s the case, then you won’t be able to recover the deleted story unless you’ve saved it in your photo gallery.
Proceed to the next step to learn how to save the deleted story to your photo gallery.
Step 3: Save the photo or video
Tap on “More” > Save Photo/Video to save the photo or video to your gallery.
After you’ve tapped on the deleted story that you want to recover, the photo/video will be expanded.
The photo/video will be displayed as a normal story.
At the bottom of the story, you’ll see three different icons including “Promote”, “Highlight”, and “More”.
The “Promote” feature allows you to promote your story to people who don’t follow you.
“Highlight” will add the story to the highlights of your choice.
Lastly, “More” will open up more options.
Tap on “More” to open up more options.
After you’ve tapped on “More”, you can either delete the story, save it, share it as a post, re-share it, or tag a business partner.
If the story is a photo, tap on “Save Photo” to save the photo to your gallery.
On the other hand, if the story is a video, tap on “Save Video” instead.
Alternatively, if you want to re-share the story, tap on “Reshare archived story”.
Re-sharing the story will include a “Memories” caption with the date that the story was posted.
You can delete the caption if you don’t want it by dragging and dropping it into the trash icon.
Congrats, you’ve successfully learned how to recover deleted Instagram stories!
Conclusion
Instagram stories that are automatically deleted can always be recovered.
You can find them in your stories archive.
However, if you manually deleted the Instagram story, you might not be able to find it in your stories archive.
This is because the story will be permanently deleted from Instagram’s database.
If that happens, your best bet is to request a download of your data from Instagram.
You can find the download request by navigating to your profile > menu > Settings > Security > Download data > Request Download.
After you’ve requested a download of your data, it will be sent to your email address.
Do note that it may take up to 48 hours or more for Instagram to collect the data to send it to you.
Even so, it is not guaranteed that you’ll be able to find your deleted Instagram story there.
Further Reading
How to See The Exact Time of an Instagram Post
How to Disable DMs (Direct Messages) on Instagram
Can Someone See That I Viewed Their Instagram Highlight?
Lim How Wei is the founder of Followchain. Feel free to follow him on Instagram.
