Recently Deleted and Undo

Two ways back

Mistakes happen in two speeds. Sometimes you know at once: your thumb slipped. Sometimes you notice a week later. The vault has an answer for each.

Undo, for the slip

six seconds

Tap Undo and the item goes back where it was. If the message is gone, nothing is lost yet: the item waits in the vault’s bin. 30 days

Recently Deleted, for later

Recently Deleted keeps anything you remove for 30 days before it is gone for good.

1. Open Settings in Sealed.
2. Tap Recently Deleted.
3. Long-press an item and choose Restore, or Delete Now.

Recently Deleted, in Settings, lets you restore an item or delete it now, before its time is up.

Each item in Recently Deleted shows how many days it has left, and Empty deletes everything there for good after you confirm.

Items whose time in Recently Deleted is up are deleted for good the next time you unlock.

What goes there, and what doesn’t

Photos, videos and documents get the waiting period. Notes and records don’t.

Deleting a note or a record asks first and then removes it from your vault for good: notes and records don’t go to Recently Deleted.

Deleting a stack deletes only the stack: its items stay in your vault and its sub-stacks move to the top level.

So before deleting a note you might want later, copy anything important out of it first.

Cleanup tools use the same safety net. Copies cleared by the duplicate finder land in the bin too, so a wrong choice there is easy to reverse. Copies the duplicate finder moves to Recently Deleted can be put back with Undo, or later from Recently Deleted.

What Recently Deleted is not

Your iPhone’s Photos app has a bin of its own. When you move a photo into the vault and then delete the original from Photos, that original goes to Photos’ bin, not the vault’s. After you import photos, Sealed asks whether to delete the originals from Photos or keep them, and says that deleted originals move to Recently Deleted in Photos.

When you delete photos and videos in Photos, they go to its Recently Deleted album for 30 days, and after that they are permanently deleted. The guide to Photos’ bin explains how to empty it for good.

Emptying it for good

If you want something gone now, Delete Now removes one item, and Empty clears the whole bin after you confirm. Both are final: there is no Undo after them.

Where Sealed helps, and where it doesn’t

It helps you recover photos, videos and documents for a set time, with a quick Undo for the moment right after. 30 days

It doesn’t do these things:

• Bring back notes or records. Deleting a note or a record asks first and then removes it from your vault for good: notes and records don’t go to Recently Deleted.
• Keep items past their time. Items whose time in Recently Deleted is up are deleted for good the next time you unlock.
• Recover a vault after the app is deleted. If you delete Sealed from an iPhone while iCloud Backup is off, the vault on that iPhone is deleted with it. The guide on deleting a vault app covers what survives.