Can Snapchats ever be recovered?

While we do place a premium on ephemerality in our Snaps and Chats, certain information may be obtained lawfully through proper legal procedure.

Snapchat servers delete all unsent Snaps after 30 days if they are not opened. Snapchat servers are set up to automatically erase all unopened Snapchats after 24 hours. To save a Snap in Chat, press and hold on it for about one second until the Save button appears, or immediately afterward when viewing or viewing a Snap.

Snapchat’s appeal is that, unlike other photo-messaging apps, photos vanish shortly after they’ve been sent. The sender can’t retrieve the picture again, and the receiver can view it for no more than a few seconds before it self-destructs.

Deleted Snapchat messages are stored in your device’s memory, in files with the ‘.nomedi’ extension. In essence, this data is undetectable to other programs. You may recover your deleted Snapchat communications by looking at each file named with the ‘. However, you may only recover deleted Snapchat videos if they have been backed up on your phone’s camera roll or sent via a text message.

On our end, it means that most Snapchats and Chats sent through Snapchat will be permanently deleted from our servers after we detect they’ve been opened by all recipients or have expired. Story posts, for example, are kept on the server longer.

If you’ve been gone from Snapchat for more than 30 days, your account is permanently deleted and can’t be reinstated. Log back in to the Snapchat app using your username and password to reactivate your account. It will take up to 24 hours for it to be reactivated.