I have 3 paper accounts under my user account. I’m testing automation with those accounts, very low frequency (a few API requests every day).
Yesterday, one task failed, and kept failing. I logged into my user account, and noticed that the paper account called account1 was gone, completely. I could not find any trace of it. account2 and account3 were still in place.
I’ve recreated account1 and its API keys, but the data is lost.
Why did this happen?
Is there anything I could do to prevent this from happening again?
@Florin_Andrei I can do some checking. There isn’t a reason a paper account would be deleted. What is the ID of one of the other paper accounts? It should start with PA.
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@Florin_Andrei I was able to find your three paper accounts: account1, account2 (PA3DVLPQEQ94), and account3, as well as your original account1. That original account1 was deleted on Mar 25, 2026 at 7:19 PM PDT. It appears from the logs that it was deleted using the dashboard by clicking the “Delete Account” button as indicated in the example below.
Perhaps you inadvertently clicked the delete button?
Also, thank you for being a long time Alpaca user. How do I know? The deleted account1 had originally been created Dec 14, 2019. These “legacy” accounts created before 2021, which internally are referred to as PAPERV2 accounts, do not support, or more problematically, get confused with some of the new features such as fractional trading and overnight orders. It is probably for the best that the account was retired.
I may be able to export some of the information from the deleted account if that would be of any use to you.
@Dan_Whitnable_Alpaca Thanks for investigating this issue!
The old account1 was not deleted on purpose. It vanished between two sessions of me using Alpaca. I have a bit of Python practicing the Alpaca API on paper accounts, and it runs at night on a cron job. The code only pulls symbol history, bars, etc from Alpaca, and simulates trading on those accounts. It’s most definitely not an agent that can click buttons, and the API usage is far from what you could call “comprehensive”.
I’ve been on that side of the table, with customers claiming “it wasn’t me”, so I understand what my report sounds like. But that’s the information I have, based on what I can observe.
Anyway, I’ve created a new account1 and nothing substantial was lost, it being a paper account.
Perhaps the fact that the account was old and likely different in some ways, contributed to its demise.
As long as this is not a recurring theme with the new accounts, it’s fine. So far the newly created accounts have worked flawlessly.
Thanks again for looking into it!
I just noticed your mention of fractional trading. I do remember getting errors, which ended up with me concluding fractional trading does not work with paper accounts.
But it sounds like that was just the old paper account.
In that case, perhaps it’s for the best that it is now gone.
I will try fractional trading again, with the new accounts.
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