Here is the single most reassuring fact if you are locked out, suspended, or banned: you do not need to log in, reset your password, or win an appeal to get your public content back. A lockout is not a deletion. Your posts and your account are two different things, and losing access to one does not erase the other.
Why a lockout is not a deletion
When you post publicly on Reddit, that content lives in Reddit’s public record - visible to anyone, indexed by search engines, and published through open feeds. Your login is how you manage that content. Take the login away - through a suspension, a ban, a lost password, or a deleted session - and the public content is still sitting there in the open. The wall went up around your dashboard, not around your words.
What this means for you
What is recoverable, and what is not
Set honest expectations up front. From the public feed you can recover:
- Public submissions - your posts, their titles, bodies, timestamps, and permalinks.
- Public comments - what you said and where, via the comments feed.
- The structure - which subreddit each item lived in, and the order it happened in.
What you cannot get back this way, and should be wary of anyone who promises it:
- Private messages and chats - these were never public and the feed does not carry them.
- Truly deleted content - if the body was hard-deleted, only a title-only stub may remain.
- Anything login-gated - drafts, saved items, and private subreddit activity stay behind the wall.
The do-it-yourself starter
- 01Take your username - you do not need to be logged in to read your public feed.
- 02Open
reddit.com/user/USERNAME/submitted.rssfor posts and/comments.rssfor comments. - 03Save the feed contents, then pull each entry’s title, link, date, and body out of the markup.
- 04Separate the title-only (removed) entries from the intact ones so you know exactly what survived.
Where it gets tedious
The same honest limits apply as with any feed-based recovery: feeds are shallow and return recent items rather than your whole history, crossposts duplicate, removed posts need flagging, and the raw HTML has to be cleaned into something readable. For a small account that is an evening. For years of activity it is real work.
Or hand it over
The Account Archive does exactly this, end to end: full public history rebuilt from the open feed, removed-versus-intact flagged, crossposts merged, formatting cleaned, delivered as DOCX + PDF in 18 hours. No login, no paid API - because none of it is needed to reach what was always public.