Confusion over lost revision and missing Save Draft button

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  shelovesgraphics · Member · Aug 27, 2014 at 12:01 pm

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  I think I have lost a revision I made to a published post because I could not see a Save Draft button to save the changes (rather than publish them) before I shut down my Mac.

  When I went to shut down, I got the following message in my Safari browser: “Are you sure you want to leave this page? The changes you made will be lost if you navigate away from this page”

  This confused me because I thought it was save to leave the page because my changes would be saved by Autosave.

  Although the original post is published, I did not want to publish my draft changes. I just wanted to save them in draft form for the moment while leaving the published post as it was.

  But I still cannot see a “Save Draft” button, only an “Update” button, so if the post has already been published do I simply have to rely on Autosave for draft changes that I don’t want to publish yet?

  Also, I have several posts and I am not sure which was the last one I worked on, where the changes seem to have been lost.

  Is there a way to see your full activity history to check, please? ie: See all draft revisions made to all posts in date order rather than having to check the Revisions lists in each post?

  Thanks,

  Sarah

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  kokkieh · Staff · Aug 28, 2014 at 9:51 am

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  If a post is already published you cannot save changes (neither via autosave or via a button), only update them. This means that changes to a published post go live the moment you update. You cannot save them and only make them live later. If you want to do that, you have to set the post back to draft, make and save your changes, and re-publish when you’re ready. During that time the post won’t appear on the blog at all. (A workaround could be to create a duplicate post and make the changes there, keeping it as a draft. When you’re ready, copy the content of the duplicate post, and replace the content of the original with it and update. Then delete the draft post.)

  That said, your browser might still save changes on an already-published post, but don’t depend on it. You can see earlier versions in the revisions module in the post editor. If you don’t see that module, click on Screen Options at the top of the screen and make sure it’s selected. http://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/post-revisions/

  P.S. This applies only to the classic editor at Posts ->All Posts in the dashboard. I don’t know if and how revisions work in the new editor as I don’t use it.