Deletion Failed? Rate Limits, Retries and Refunds, Answered

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title: "Deletion Failed? Rate Limits, Retries and Refunds, Answered"
description: "Deletion runs fail in a handful of ways and the fix depends on which one you hit. The five questions that come up most, with the signal to check first."
tags: ["privacy", "deletion", "troubleshooting", "faq"]

canonical_url: https://digital-footprint-health.shop/blog/deletion-failed-retry-faq

Deletion Failed? Rate Limits, Retries and Refunds, Answered

Deletion runs fail in a handful of ways and the fix depends on which one you hit. The five questions that come up most, with the signal to check first.

The short version first, then the parts that usually get skipped.

Most failed deletions are not failures at all. They are throttling, partial completion, or a log nobody read, and each of those wants a different next step.

What actually works, in order: Open the failure log before touching the retry button. Work out whether the run stopped on a rate limit, on one specific item, or on authentication, then act on that instead of rerunning the whole batch.

The numbers worth knowing: Read the log first: a rate limit wants a wait, a per-item failure wants that item inspected, and an auth error wants a fresh token.

Where people go wrong: Hammering retry. Repeated runs against a rate limit extend the lockout and turn a twenty-minute wait into a lost day.

A note on defaults. Every tool in this space ships with settings chosen for the average case, and if your situation is not average, the default path is what sends you back to redo the work a month later. Decide what you are optimising for in one sentence, then let that sentence filter the steps. Anything that does not connect to it can wait.

I keep the full walkthrough with the order of operations on my own site, here: https://digital-footprint-health.shop/blog/deletion-failed-retry-faq