Reddit is in turmoil. The company has decided to make it prohibitively expensive for third-party Reddit apps to continue operating after June 30, a move that has not gone down well with users. If these events, or something else, have prompted you to delete your Reddit account, there are a few things you should do first.

Reddit, like other social media platforms, gives you the ability to request a copy of your data at any time. You can find the option on the company’s Data Request page, where you can select the relevant options you’d like to retrieve. If you live in Europe, you can request the data under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or if you live in California, you can opt for the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) / California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA). If you live in other regions, simply select Other. Then select I want data from my full-time at Reddit and click Submit. The download link for all of this data will appear in your Reddit message inbox.

You can also use third-party tools like reddit-user-to-sqlite or Reddit Media Downloader to download things that the official data request tool might not include, or to simply download your data faster. These tools won't download your private messages, but any public data should download fairly quickly.

If your posts or comments are missing from the data archive, you can check to see if they’ve been deleted. Tools like Reveddit and Unddit can help with that. Unfortunately, these tools aren’t as useful as they used to be after Reddit banned the pushshift.io service that helped them recover deleted posts and comments. However, Unddit can still help you see content that was deleted before May 1, 2023, and Reveddit is still useful for showing you content that was deleted by moderators (but not by users themselves). You can use these services to find some of your older deleted posts and comments and make a copy of them.