Lost draft, now lost it entirely
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I was editing over a several day period. Then today when I tried to upload images I kept getting “error” messages. I went to check account status, it prompted me to confirm my login. I did. Then the draft had reverted to one 5 days ago. So 80% of my work had been done since then, and is now lost. I was sloppy, I usually copy paste to another document, but I didn’t this time.
I then tried following instructions on how to review drafts. It said to go to the Publish module. Which prompted me to inadvertently publish a really crappy looking version. Which I quickly tried to unpublish, but there was only a “trash” option.
So …. where’s the work I did this weekend? Any way to recover?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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There is a long standing issue Staff are aware of if you use the new post editor for creating or editing posts.
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://hayleyinthekimberley.wordpress.com/wp-admin/edit.php?post_status=draft&post_type=postTo locate draft PAGES Dashboard > Pages> All Pages > Drafts
http://hayleyinthekimberley.wordpress.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
Dashboard > Posts > All Posts > Add New
If you have cookies enabled on your browser your preference will be saved unless or until your clear your cookies, and it will take you to the classic editor automatically every time you create a new post via the drop-down menu in the black admin bar or edit a post via the edit button on the blog itself.2. Immediately after creating a post and entering a title click the save draft link. Thereafter, “click save draft” frequently.
3. Always allow pages to fully load before clicking any other links.
4. 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.
5. Use an offline blog editor so you have backups on your own computer http://en.support.wordpress.com/xml-rpc/
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Yes, I used the “Beep Beep Boop” editor, that’s the one that WordPress.com opened for me when I wanted to write a new posting. I didn’t “chose” it.
And it has a button “Save Draft” which I would hit constantly. Before you hit that button, the “Current Status” line says “New Draft”. When you hit “Save Draft” this status changes to “Saved Draft”.
If I disconnect the internet, and hit “Save Draft”, I get the message “Oops! An error occurred while saving the post. Please refresh the page and try again.” That’s fine, at that point I can copy-paste from the browser buffer to something like Word and stop trusting it.
But what happened to me was that I was getting the “Saved Draft” status after hitting “Save Draft”. But now that I think about it, I probably didn’t get the pop-down “Draft saved on ___. Keep on goin’!”. But absence of feedback is not good feedback.
The status it showed me remained “Draft Saved”. Which apparently means nothing (if it’s not saved and confirmed on a server, it’s not “saved”, period).
You’re saying staff is “aware” of this? This is a pretty serious problem. There are lots of easy fixes/improvements that come to mind, for example a simple status line somewhere that says “draft last saved to servers at: xxx” with a date and time. Lots of easy fixes to avoid the main failure mode: not notify the user in any way while the page is open, and there’s time to copy-save the text to somewhere else.
Recommendations of how to avoid this are not helpful at all, but I thank you for the effort.
My take away is not to trust anything WordPress.Com user interface tells me. I have grown lazy, trusting services like Google Docs, DropBox, Office365 to not screw things up like this. It’s 2015 after all. I thought this was something obscure or I did something stupid, but if “staff are aware” and it’s “longstanding” (!) issue and they haven’t rushed out improvements, that’s a Bad Thing.
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I tagged this thread for Staff to take notice of your issues, concerns and feedback. Please subscribe to it so you are notified when they respond. To subscribe look in the sidebar of this thread, find the subscribe to topics link and click it.
You may also want to visit this thread https://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/please-reinstate-the-option-of-choice-to-use-the-old-publishing-format/page/6?replies=170#post-2314777
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Who knows ‘tell me’ cause my transfer from my blog now I’m all in the draft and I can not publish …. Thanks
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@dolcesimo
Click this link please and start your own thread https://en.forums.wordpress.com/?new=1
In it clearly describe exactly what content you lost and provide titles and or URLs for pages or posts you refer to. -
@dolcesimo
I note that you username is linked to a URL that does not exist. Make sure you provide the URL for your blog in your own new thread please. -
Hi petersmagnusson,
I do see a post in your trash folder. Is this the missing one?
https://petersmagnusson.wordpress.com/wp-admin/edit.php?post_status=trash&post_type=post
There are problems with the autosave in the new editor that can get people in trouble if they have the editor open in multiple windows and other similar issues that we are working on, but if you manually hit save draft, the post is saved to the server.
You can see all the posts in the new interface, but when you are looking for past versions, or wondering what happened to a draft, the WP admin view is easier for now. Here’s a direct link to that dashboard:
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