autosave is worthless!
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So I just spent 30 or 40 minutes adding on to a long post. Should I have saved every five minutes? Absolutely. Did I? No. But I did decide to save at that point. Turns out that, since I had left my browser window open while the computer was asleep (prior to the writing period), I was not logged in. So instead of saving, I was taken to the login page. After logging in I was returned to my post and, of course, all of the new work was nowhere to be found.
My next step was to see if WordPress has an autosave feature. It does! Great! Wow, an autosave every two minutes! Awesome! Wait… It only saves the last autosave? It writes over the previous ones? Hasn’t it been more than two minutes since my draft was reopened without my new writing? Yes, it has. Thus, the only available autosave was created from the truncated article while I was trying to find out how to access the autosave… WTF?!?!?! I’ve got to think that this happens with some regularity. Why would you have an autosave feature that only helps you out if you realize your mistake within 120 seconds? I know you can’t save everything, but would it be too much too ask for access to five or ten versions? Even for a long post, how much space can that really take up?
I suppose it’s possible that even if such a feature existed, it may not have functioned in this case since I wasn’t logged in. But wouldn’t it be possible for WP to require you to login at the moment it tries to create a new autosave? Or, if it wasn’t even trying to create an autosave in this case (because I wasn’t logged in), then would it be too hard to have a WP attempt to refresh itself every X minutes, thus letting you know that you are not logged in before you go ahead and spend a half hour or more working on something that is not being autosaved?
I can’t believe I’m the only person who leaves a browser window open, gets distracted long enough for the computer to go to sleep, and then returns to the browser and an open draft without knowing or remembering to log in…
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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You might thing about taking my outlook on this. Never, ever, ever, trust the web or any web related application. There are just too many things that can go wrong. At the very least, manually save and save often and given my experience, right before I hit the save button, I switch to the HTML tab, copy everything to the clipboard and then save. That way if it doesn’t come back I can just paste in from the clipboard. If I’m going to be away from the computer for a while I’ll paste it into a plain text file and save it to my desktop.
But most of the time I use a blog editor application, Ecto, which save everything I do right on my computer. When I’m done with the post and ready to publish it, I publish it directly from the blog editor. If you are on Windows, Windows Live Writer or BlogDesk are free downloads. Ecto is the best for Macs and although it is not free, at around $20 it won’t break the bank either.
This is why you will never, ever get me to move to the “cloud.” Too many ways for it (or the internet) to fail me when I need it the most.
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I’m sorry to hear you lost your work.
There a few things to keep in mind about auto-save and revisions:
* Revisions are only saved when you actively save or update your post. Note that you don’t have to publish your post to save revisions – new revisions are created whenever your save a draft as well.
* Autosave is meant to be used as a safety net, but it can’t be relied upon as a single solution.
* When you are logged out of your blog, a notice appears on the edit page that informs you that any further edits will not be saved.
* You can check the Remember Me box when you log in to make sure you will remain logged in even if your computer goes to sleep.
Thesacredpath mentioned a few useful precautions and measures to avoid these kinds of incidents. Personally I wouldn’t copy the HTML every time I save a post, but to each his own.
On our end, I can think of two ways to address the issue you were having:
* Show a more prominent alert when you get logged out while editing
* Save more autosave revisions
I will pass these on as feature suggestions on your behalf.
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Thanks to both of you for the replies. I’m the first to admit that my own carelessness is to blame here. I generally do save a draft every five minutes or so, but was on a roll last night and, well… I’m a Mac user, so will look into Ecto. I’m still fairly new to blogging, so didn’t know about this type of program. Thanks thesacredpath. Thanks for your reply as well, ranh. I think the two feature suggestions you list are good ones and appreciate you passing them on.
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Another note, ranh – I generally write my posts in fullscreen mode, in which the notice you mentioned is not visible.
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