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I could make use of my own older post but I cannot find it neither in my answer list nor in my deleted answer list (https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=user%3Ame+deleted%3A1+is%3Aanswer). I have a suspicion that asker just deleted the question with my answer.

Is it possible to find my own answer if this was somebody else's question that was deleted?

If I can't, can I be notified somehow if a question that I answered was deleted, so I could prevent the loss of my post?

There are several related questions but I believe they address questions and answers that were deleted by the user him/herself, not by somebody else.

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  • I would ask on stackoverflow meta, as any users with high rep (10k+) could help you.
    – yagmoth555
    Sep 23, 2017 at 16:10
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    @yagmoth555 OP has 26k reputation on Stack Overflow, so that should be enough to search for deleted posts.
    – Donald Duck
    Sep 23, 2017 at 17:54

2 Answers 2

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No, I'm afraid you can't see your answer on a deleted question, unless you have more than 10k reputation on the site.

If you have the link, you have a couple of options:

  • ask at the site's meta or, better, in chat, for someone with 10k reputation to retrieve your answer's text for you
  • you may be able to find the question and answer at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, depending on if the question was crawled before it was deleted
  • if the question was deleted, you should be able to get to it via the Stack Exchange Data Explorer
  • if the question was deleted long ago, your last chance to get it is to pull it from the data dump; that's only updated every few months

As for being notified when a question where you have an answer is deleted, there are several feature requests here for such a thing. I don't know if they've been outright declined, but they haven't gained much traction either.

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  • I have more than 10k on the hub I'm after, so my primary concern is to find the post that was deleted. Thanks for the hint on data dump, I'll take a closer look.
    – Estus Flask
    Sep 23, 2017 at 16:29
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    Eh, I think we changed that. @estus - if you have the link to the post, you should be able to see the whole thing (that is - if you have an answer on a deleted question, you should be able to see it and the question, if you have a link to the question).
    – Oded
    Sep 23, 2017 at 16:58
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    @Oded, the issue is when you don't have a link to the question... how do you find your own answer? The question says it is not visible in your list of answers or list of deleted answers.
    – D.W.
    Sep 24, 2017 at 4:14
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I can confirm that it is possible not only to see, but to look for your own answers on deleted answers search page with moderator tools privilege, even if it is the question and not the answer that was deleted.

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