Rescuing files hosted on Discord

Began writing this article December 28th 2024, finished on the same day.

←← Take me back to the writings directory!

Who is this for? This guide is for fellow webmasters who have files on their website hosted on Discord. If you didn't know, Discord file links expire after 24 hours when posted off-platform, so files are prone to breaking when using Discord as a host. This change is fairly recent, kicking around late 2023, so there may be a decent number of webmasters who used Discord as a file host and are now dealing with broken links.

How to do it

I will be describing the steps as if you're trying to recover a Discord-hosted image, but the methods below should work for any kind of file provided you can find the link.

  1. Locate your broken image

  2. Right click the image and save the image link (you can also just copy it from your website code if you have it open)

  3. Go onto Discord and paste the link somewhere — could be a server, could be a DM, it doesn't matter. Once you post the image link, it'll be rendered in chat as an image which you can then download to your computer (in my experience, downloading straight from the expired link doesn't seem to work)

Once you have your file on your computer, it is advised to move that file to a dedicated host. If you're an artist looking for an image host, maybe it's worth checking my "image hosting for artists" article for a few recommendations. There's nothing better than hosting files on your own site though, if you can help it.

I will also note that the method above may not work under the circumstance where the file link leads to a file that's on a deleted Discord server. (I haven't actually seen this play out, but I'm making an educated guess as to what might happen)