# Why is recovery taking so long?

What happened, what it means, and what to do next.

- [All support guides](/snapattic/support/)
- [Snapattic home](/snapattic/)

Recovering a large archive simply takes time, and Snapattic is deliberately conservative so
it never disrupts your account.

## What is happening
- It reads your attachments over a private, direct connection to your provider and saves photos one at a
  time, in original quality, organized by year.
- Providers limit how much can be downloaded. When a limit is reached,
  recovery pauses until the next day. See [Daily limit](./daily-limit.md).

## Why it can take multiple days
An inbox with years of photos can be many gigabytes. Providers can throttle downloads to
protect your account, so a full recovery may span several days — each day resuming from the last
saved checkpoint (if a day ended mid-message, that message is re-checked, but already-saved
photos are skipped). See [Resume](./resume.md).

## What to do
- **Leave Continue recovery running each day** until it finishes. Progress is saved; you never lose
  what is already recovered.
- Recovery runs entirely on your computer. It does not upload anything, and it never touches your
  mail.

## It seems stuck
If nothing has progressed for a long while, check your connection and choose **Continue recovery**.
If a single download keeps failing after retries, resume later: it remains eligible instead of being
silently called corrupt or skipped. See [Network](./network.md) and
[Corrupt attachments](./corrupt-attachments.md).