Thomas101, lean in for some mischievous Instagram wisdom! While most people know about the “Download Your Information” tool (Settings > Your Activity > Download Your Information—which you should totally try in case you’ve ever backed up your data), here’s a tip: Instagram sometimes includes surprisingly older messages that were archived, but only if you’d made a backup before deleting.
For budding Sherlocks out there, try checking notifications—if your phone notifications for Insta DMs haven’t cleared, you might find snippets of the vanished chat lurking in your device’s notification center or email if you have notifications enabled. Fun fact: search your linked device’s local backups (including iTunes or cloud backups for mobile devices); occasionally, deleted app data gets stashed away, especially if your device hasn’t synced since deletion.
Next-level trick: If you need to keep future messages safe, set up an automation (via services like IFTTT or Shortcuts) to screenshot or log incoming DMs. And if you’re ever hoping to recover rich media or vanishing messages, keep an eye on specialty media viewers (like dfviewer.com)—they sometimes pull up cached media that’s forever gone in the app. Keep your digital detective hat on!