Instagram deleting archived stories, turning old videos into photos

55 pointsposted 3 hours ago
by tantalor

21 Comments

avalys

3 hours ago

This looks more like they had a bug and lost a few, other than a static photo representation that was probably stored independently.

srik

3 hours ago

It affected a lot more people actually, including one of my old account’s main video posts, so not just stories. It wasn’t popular but still sucked because I was featuring penmanship in motion but now many of them are just static screenshots. But that’s the implicit risk when hosting on someone else’s platform so c'est la vie I guess.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/sri.letterstudy

netsharc

3 hours ago

Geez, yeah, that notice reads like they lost some data. And didn't tell anyone about it, unless you looked. And in July 2025 they'll memory-hole the "Sorry^W, we lost your data." notice.

Edit: Correction, there's no "Sorry".

benterix

3 hours ago

Once they decided to block showing new posts for tags, leaving only the so-called "top posts", I stopped using Instagram as it stopped making any sense to me, i.e. I could no longer find anything interesting.

justinator

2 hours ago

What did you start using, instead?

dylan604

2 hours ago

Maybe they are happy in recovery instead of constantly chasing the tail of the dragon. That would be the happiest ending

justsomehnguy

an hour ago

LOL?

You don't need to be glued to some social media service 24/7.

KTibow

an hour ago

If getting off it was that easy, a lot less people would be using social media

livinglist

an hour ago

I do find that my video stories from months ago have very severely degraded image quality.

jjulius

3 hours ago

Yet another friendly reminder that your data isn't yours unless you store it locally.

gcarvalho

2 hours ago

And also that 1 copy is (eventually) 0 copies.

AStonesThrow

2 hours ago

And you wrote/maintain the app that can open, process, and serve that data. And you can keep up with storage technologies as they age and become obsolete. And you can run a perfect IDS/IPS/DLP/firewall secure environment with your own custom self-hosted cloud. And your local cloud has four-nines high-availability clustering, power, and network peering. glhf.

jchw

an hour ago

Or you could just copy the JPEG files to multiple devices, using... files, without any specific app. You could use any old software that can copy files from one place to another, like SyncThing, which will happily sit in the background and copy your photos to whatever devices you currently use. If SyncThing stops getting updated, switch to something else. Or copy it by hand again.

Images are files. You do not need to be a computer scientist. If you want them to last, make copies.

Let me just preempt it ahead of time:

> "But what if everything I know and love burns to the ground?"

Consider the following: if all of your computers/phones/tablets/NASes/etc. are destroyed simultaneously, you might have bigger concerns to worry about than losing some photos.

jjulius

an hour ago

You're over-engineering what is otherwise a straightforward solution for this particular instance. Instagram allows you to save stories to your mobile device, so...

1.) Download your story to your mobile device. Congratulations, you now have your own copy of your story that is yours and not under control of Instagram. You could stop here if you want, or you could...

2.) Copy the file to another device you might keep in your home. This could be a desktop, a laptop, a NAS, a generic external hard drive, whathaveyou. Congratulations, now you have three copies of this (Instagram's servers, your mobile device, and whatever third option you chose).

With video content like this, they're typically in popular formats that are unlikely to "go out of style" any time soon.

Beyond this particular instance? You're still over-engineering things. Most people are pretty simple - they want to keep their photos and videos, maybe some word documents and such, music and movies. Those formats are so standardized that all you need to do is store them on any electronic device you own at home, and move them to whatever new device you get when you upgrade. There's certainly a non-zero risk of device failure, but as we see in this very thread, there's also a non-zero risk of data loss in the cloud, so... c'est la vie.

Nobody really needs all of what you described in order to keep most of what they want.

AStonesThrow

40 minutes ago

Y'all are being weird about content from an online service that, I would assume, is meant to be shared with others, not hoarded on your local storage.

I don't know what IG "archiving" entails, does it remove stories from public view or something?

The main point of using an online service like IG is for serving and sharing your content. Not keeping it to yourself. IG stores and serves public content in a secure fashion, with very high availability and unparalelled reachability.

You've replied to my "over-engineering" with single-user hoarding solutions. Do you want to serve the content or not?

IG posts involve more than a JPEG. "Stories" are slideshows made of multiple items. There is metadata, tagging, other users: context. If you want to download a couple of JPEGs and lose all that context, you're not using IG anymore, you're hoarding.

jjulius

35 minutes ago

>I don't know what IG "archiving" entails, does it remove stories from public view or something?

Ah, there's the disconnect.

"Stories" only display for 24 hours, and then they're gone from your profile. That said, they're saved in a story archive that only you have access to - ostensibly, as it says in their settings menu, so you "don't have to save them to your phone". They're not being served to users, they're just there for you to look back on, and maybe re-share if you want to in the future.

>Do you want to serve the content or not?

Maybe. Maybe not. It's up to the individual to decide. My point is, it does not have to be that complicated for things that one wants to, essentially, just archive.

>The main point of using an online service like IG is for serving and sharing your content. Not keeping it to yourself.

Sure! And what happens if something that you really want shared on your IG profile gets deleted from a bug like this? Wouldn't it help to, I dunno... have that stored somewhere "in case of emergencies"? ;)

user

an hour ago

[deleted]