How to recover unpublished content

  • Unknown's avatar
    nbbchockey23 · Member ·

    I have a SOLUTION here, not a question.

    I recently lost 1,500 words of content to my utter frustration, and then had it restored. Here’s the situation:

    You are in the middle of writing a blog post but get distracted for a couple hours with something else. Everything is saved so far, so no problems.

    You come back after your two hour distraction and pick up right where you left off. You do not realize that because of the long delay, WordPress is no longer autosaving every few minutes. You put nearly an hour of typing in, and hit “Save Draft” when finished with your 4500 word masterpiece! You get an error message that says “Try again.” You panic. You don’t want to touch a thing on this page. Maybe I can still save this somehow. You pull up a different tab and see if you can go into drafts that way and find your newest content. Nope. It’s back to where you left off before your break. Aggghhhh!!!

    You switch back to your main tab and sweat and think. You google it and find nothing (except this piece!). You decide the only thing left to do is hit the back arrow on your internet page. and risk it, since you’ve nothing more to lose. You click it. It goes back to your previous draft. Strike one. You hit back again, it does it again. Strike two. You hit back again. I don’t remember what id did at this point :) Strike three, right? It was either the third or fourth time I clicked back that this interesting little header popped up above my article draft asking me if I wanted to restore the previous version because it was different than what I had below (below was now blank, so I assumed all I would get back was my draft from three hours ago). BUT NO! I clicked “yes” to try this option, and VOILA! my full article was back! I immediately saved a copy in word too :) I was so thankful and happy that I had to find somewhere on the internet to share the good news. I hope it works for you too!

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

  • Unknown's avatar
    timethief · Member ·

    Hi there,
    Provided you did not create the post in the new Beep Beep Boop editor where it’s saved only on your browser, and is not auto-saved to the servers for your blog you may be able to recover a lost post or page.

    If the post was created on the dashboard of your own blog at Dashboard > Posts > All Posts > Add New then you ought to be able to recover a lost post or page from revisions if needs be.
    http://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/post-revisions/

    See also if applicable > restoring from trash http://en.support.wordpress.com/trash/#restoring-from-trash

    To locate draft POSTS Dashboard > Posts > All Post > Drafts
    http://pastorham.com/wp-admin/edit.php?post_status=draft&post_type=post

    To locate draft PAGES Dashboard > Pages> All Pages > Drafts
    http://pastorham.com/wp-admin/edit.php?post_status=draft&post_type=page

    (If you are referring to a Page then see here > http://en.support.wordpress.com/pages/page-revisions/)

    If you cannot locate a revision or restore from Trash then the content has been lost and cannot be recovered.

    I recommend:

    1. Always create your posts on the dashboard of your own blog at
    2. Dashboard > Posts > All Posts > Add New
    3. Immediately after creating a post and entering a title click the save draft link. Thereafter, “click save draft” frequently.
    4. Always allow pages to fully load before clicking any other links.
    5. Never leave a post or page open for content creation or editing and walk away from it, or open another tab in the same blog and work on something else while it is still open. Save it properly and return to edit it later.
    6. Use an offline blog editor so you have backups on your own computer http://en.support.wordpress.com/xml-rpc/

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