When you delete a piece of content in Riterly, it does not disappear immediately. It moves to Trash, where it stays for 30 days before permanent removal. This gives you a meaningful window to recover work you deleted by mistake — and it keeps your active workspace clean in the meantime.
What Trash Is
Riterly uses a soft-delete system. Deleting a piece of content does not remove it from the system — it moves it to a holding area called Trash. The content remains there, fully intact, for 30 days. After that window, it is permanently removed.
You access Trash through the sidebar navigation.
The kanban board stays clean when content is deleted. Trashed content does not appear in the active pipeline view, so your working board only shows content that is actually in progress.
The 30-day window is fixed. Riterly does not offer a configurable retention period — you cannot extend or shorten it.
What Each Trash Entry Shows
Each entry in the Trash view displays four pieces of information:
- Title — the name of the deleted piece of content
- Pipeline stage — the stage the content was in at the time of deletion
- Deletion date — when the content was deleted
- Days remaining — how many days are left before permanent deletion
This information is enough to identify a piece of content and decide whether to restore it or let it expire.
How Restoring Works
The Restore action returns content to the exact pipeline stage it was in when you deleted it. If a piece was at Outline Review when you deleted it, restoring it brings it back to Outline Review — not to the beginning of the pipeline, and not to a generic draft state.
Everything is restored with it: title, notes, references, outline, draft, and metadata. Nothing is stripped out during the deletion or recovery process.
This means restoring a piece of content is genuinely reversible. You do not lose work by deleting something, provided you restore it within the 30-day window.
Deleting vs. Archiving
Deleting and archiving are not interchangeable actions, and it matters which one you use.
Archiving is for published content you want to move out of the active pipeline. It does not start any countdown, and there is no deletion risk. The content is retained without time pressure.
Deleting starts the 30-day clock. Once that window closes, the content is gone permanently.
If you have published a piece and want to clear it from your active view, archive it — do not delete it. Delete is the right action when you genuinely no longer want the content and are comfortable with it being removed after 30 days.
Permanent Deletion and Its Limits
Once content is permanently deleted — either because the 30-day window expired or because you manually triggered permanent deletion from the Trash view — there is no recovery path. The content cannot be restored.
You can manually permanently delete content from Trash before the window expires. This is useful if you want to clean up the Trash view intentionally and are confident you no longer need the content.
If you are not certain, wait. The 30-day window is generous enough that there is rarely a good reason to permanently delete ahead of schedule.
Two things Trash does not cover: writing profile version history, which is managed separately and is unaffected by content deletion, and Sandbox runs, which are also outside the Trash system.
Related help topics:
- Pipeline stages — to understand where restored content lands in your workflow
- Archiving — for published content you want to retain without deletion risk
- Writing profile version history — for managing changes to your writing profiles, separate from content in Trash