Posts overwritten by previous ones, no revision option

  • Unknown's avatar
    kingsleycw13 · Member ·

    Hi there!
    I have lost 3 posts now due to one post overwriting another whilst editing.

    It is very strange, as the original tags are still in place on the post, yet the body text has been replaced by a different post that has already been published.

    What is also strange, is that the ‘revisions’ option is missing from the overwritten post. This is one of them:

    Writing 101 – Day 4, The Serial Killer – Loss

    I have just noticed that another post from today, created at a similar time, has no revisions attached to it as well, and I know that the post wasn’t done in one go, as I got interrupted in the middle of it! Shouldn’t ‘autosave’ create a revision point?

    Writing 101 – 3 songs (Not as late as it could be…)

    And, believe it or not (!) there is another one. It is a draft, so I cannot post a direct link, but has text substituted as well. The draft is about this post, but contains an earlier haiku:

    Not posting anymore till issues resolved

    Is it my laptop? Is it a software glitch? I am very wary about losing more posts, as the three I have already said goodbye to were personal and very tricky to write – there’s no way I can repeat the event, so i’ve lost them…unless you genii can get them back!
    Thank you!

    Kingsley :-)

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

  • staff-hbadger · Staff ·

    Hmmm, I want to help but I’m not sure I understand exactly what has happened. Has content that you did not intend for a specific post somehow appear on that post? And when you say “the ‘revisions’ option is missing from the overwritten post” do you mean that in your dashboard the revisions line is missing on the edit screen for the post?

    According to the Post Revisions support documentation

    The Revisions screen shows any backup copies of your post. Each time you click Save Draft or Update, a revision is saved. WordPress.com will store the last 25 revisions for each post on your blog. Revisions allow you to look back at the recent changes you’ve made and revert to an earlier version if necessary.

    Are your previous revisions not showing up when you use that? Here is the support doc with screen shots if that might be useful to you:
    http://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/post-revisions/

    The other issue might be autosave. Did you make revisions after publishing the content, but your revisions are not showing up on the live page despite your revisions being autosaved? It may be that that though your revisions autosaved, the revisions won’t go live until you click the Update Post/Page button. More information about autosave is here: http://en.support.wordpress.com/autosave/

    I hope that helps. I’d hate for you to lose all that writing!

  • Unknown's avatar
    timethief · Member ·

    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

    If you cannot find the post/page in revisions or in Trash then it’s gone and cannot be recovered.

    I recommend:
    Always create your posts on the dashboard of your own blog at
    Dashboard > Posts > All Posts > Add New

    Always allow pages to fully load before clicking any other links.

    Never leave a post open for content creation or for editing and walk away from it and then return. Save it and log out of WordPress.com properly.

    Always use an offline blog editor so you have backups on your own computer http://en.support.wordpress.com/xml-rpc/

  • Unknown's avatar
    raincoaster · Member ·

    I suggest you use Blogdesk or Windows Live Writer until we hear back from staff on this. That is a very weird error, and using either of them will at least save your work.

  • Unknown's avatar
    jeremeylduvall · Member ·

    Hi Kingsley,

    First, to your question “Shouldn’t ‘autosave’ create a revision point?”, the answer is yes, both autosave and manually saving a draft should create a point in your revision history.

    If I understand the issue correctly, when you’re editing your post, abruptly, the text within the current post you’re editing will be replaced by previous text from a completely separate post. Is that correct? Does this happen on the refresh of a screen or when you exit WordPress.com and come back to edit the post at a later date?

    I see you recently published a post “Writing 101, Day 6 – A character Study”. Did you experience issues with that post as well?

  • Unknown's avatar
    raincoaster · Member ·

    Also: are you using the New Post button on the grey Admin bar? There are several issues with it and I suggest you avoid it, instead, using the dashboard Posts->Add New page.

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