My post disappeared when I hit Publish

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  harrynmelissa · Member · May 6, 2012 at 12:16 am

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  After working for hours on a post, I hit “publish” and all of the content, including the title, disappeared! This is the 3rd time this has happened. Very frustrating!! I’ve tried manually saving content in addition to WordPress’ frequent auto-saves, but still it’s vanished without a trace! Do I really have to start over from scratch, or can I find it somewhere? My Dashboard says I have no drafts, and a search of a keyword yields 0 results. Is anyone else having this problem? Help!

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

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  raincoaster · Member · May 6, 2012 at 12:26 am

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  Unfortunately this is a random bug that nobody has been able to figure out. It ONLY affects posts that take a long time to write.

  Look in your Trash file to see if it might possibly be there. Otherwise, I’m afraid it’s probably gone.

  There are two ways to prevent it while the glitch continues to affect WP.com:

  1) use an offline blog editor like Windows Live Writer or
  2) start the post, publish it as Private, then continue to write the post as normal. Your saves will be saved. Then when it’s ready, publish it publicly. For some reason that gets around the autosave fail that affects drafts.

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  harrynmelissa · Member · May 6, 2012 at 12:42 am

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  Thanks, this sounds helpful…but when I went to check my Trash file, I didn’t see a trash file along the left side of the page. Where is it?

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  justpi · Member · May 6, 2012 at 5:12 am

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  Is the post still listed in in Posts > All Posts? If so, click Edit and check the Revisions module for a previous saved version. If you’re not seeing the Revisions module while on the post editor screen, click Screen Options (top right) to activate it.

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  harrynmelissa · Member · May 6, 2012 at 8:19 am

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  Hi, justpi,
  Thanks for your reply. I was looking forward to hunting in the Revisions module, but I don’t see one, even when I click Screen Options. I wonder if there are multiple versions of wordpress?

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  justpi · Member · May 6, 2012 at 9:48 am

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  Click Screen Options where? Each dashboard screen has different screen options. If the post is still listed in Posts > All Posts, you click Edit then click Screen Options to tick “Revisions”. If that’s what you did, and you see no “Revisions”, then no previous version has been saved.

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  harrynmelissa · Member · May 6, 2012 at 11:42 am

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  That is totally weird…’cuz I saved it manually several times, in addition to the auto-save that wordpress.com does every few minutes. But, yes, I did look for “revisions” exactly where you said. I don’t see any such option offered on my site, even in “Screen Options.”