Archive Reddit Accounts Before They Vanish
RedLens pulls all of an account's public posts and comments into one SQLite database on your machine. Later syncs fetch only new activity.
Public Reddit history disappears all the time: accounts get deleted, subreddits go private, moderators purge threads. If you’re researching a discussion — a topic, a community, or one prolific account — the safe move is to archive it locally before it vanishes. RedLens does that in one command.
What you need
- Python 3.11 or newer
pip install redlens(MIT-licensed, two runtime dependencies)
No Reddit account and no API key. RedLens reads public data through arctic-shift, a free mirror of public Reddit history, so there’s no OAuth registration and no rate-limit negotiation with Reddit itself.
Archive an account
redlens sync spez
That pulls every public post and comment the account has made into a single SQLite database on your machine (the location comes from platformdirs; redlens list shows what you have). The sync is incremental — run it again next week and it only fetches what’s new.
Look at what you got
redlens show spez
redlens serve
show prints a summary in the terminal; serve opens a local dashboard with activity over time, subreddit breakdowns, and drill-downs into individual threads. If you want a file you can keep or send to a colleague, redlens page and redlens report emit standalone HTML — and reports can pseudonymize usernames before you share them.
Get the data out
Everything is plain SQLite, so you can query it directly — but for most workflows redlens export is faster:
redlens export spez --format jsonl
JSON, CSV, and JSONL are supported, so the archive drops straight into pandas, a spreadsheet, or whatever pipeline you already run.
Why local-first matters
An archive you control can’t be retroactively edited, deleted, or paywalled. One SQLite file is easy to back up, easy to diff, and easy to delete when a project ends — which is exactly the custody story you want when the data is other people’s public speech. Nothing RedLens collects ever leaves your machine unless you export it.
Next: once you’re tracking more than one account, the interesting questions are about how accounts behave together — see our guide to detecting coordinated posting networks.