Published blog post overwritten by draft on secondary device
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Hi,
I have a few recent blog posts which have been overwritten by old incomplete drafts from the app on my phone. How can I recover them?
Blog posts (now empty):
https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/the-end-of-human-doctors-introduction/
https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2017/04/24/the-end-of-human-doctors-understanding-medicine/
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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I have managed to recreate the posts from my browser and google cache, but now they have difference web addresses (because the dates are different). This means the previous links are broken. I was getting several hundred views per day from social media, so if possible I would like to have the addresses restored.
The current addresses are as follows:
https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2017/04/14/the-end-of-human-doctors-introduction/
https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2017/05/01/the-end-of-human-doctors-understanding-medicine/
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Hi there,
To fix the permalinks, edit the posts and change the publication dates. Then the links should go back to what they were before, and the old ones will work again.
For future reference, if a post changes unexpectedly you should usually also be able to revert it to an older version via Revisions. If you edit the post and view the post settings, the Revisions link is in the Status section:
https://en.support.wordpress.com/editors/page-post-revisions/
I’m curious how this happened in the first place, though. Can you remember exactly what you did that caused the post to be replaced with the mobile draft? This sounds like a bug that we need to fix. Thanks!
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Yeah, the bug was pretty nasty.
I had written the posts between my phone and laptop, but finished them and published on my laptop.
Apparently my phone app had stored local changes in the draft documents. I’m not sure if it always does this, or if I had written in it while I didn’t have internet access.
Because of the auto-save feature, as soon as I happened to open them on my phone it overwrote the published posts and dumped to old versions into my drafts folder.
There was some very strange behaviour associated with it. I recreated the posts from cache in the draft documents and published, and one of them kept its views while the other one had far fewer views than it should (but not zero). Both retained their comments.
Thanks very much for the help. I looked through the help documents but couldn’t find the revisions or date stuff. The revision worked perfectly.
Thanks again.
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Apparently my phone app had stored local changes in the draft documents. I’m not sure if it always does this, or if I had written in it while I didn’t have internet access.
The apps only store changes/drafts locally, until you either manually sync the draft to the web or publish the post, or otherwise tap the Update button on an already published post. It doesn’t autosave changes to the web automatically like a browser, in order to conserve bandwidth on mobile connections.
Because of the auto-save feature, as soon as I happened to open them on my phone it overwrote the published posts and dumped to old versions into my drafts folder.
That should not happen at all, as there is no auto-sync between the mobile app editor and the web. Are you sure you accessed it using the mobile app, and not the web browser on your mobile device?
Can you please let me know if this was on the iOS or Android app, and also the version number of the app?
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It was the Android app. Sorry, I uninstalled it immediately so I can’t get you the version number, but I auto-update my apps daily so it should have been up to date.
I am very sure I didn’t open it on my laptop, because the drafts didn’t exist on the online version. They were only stored locally.
I opened them because I didn’t know what they were (they had a different title than my published posts that I had used as a working title).
I assumed something weird happened like the app opened a draft and it recognised it had been published already, and for some reason updated it. I really doubt I would have pressed any update or publish buttons, because they were half-finished drafts that I hadn’t changed.
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Thanks for the extra information. I’ll try to replicate this, and will make sure it’s reported to our developers so they can fix it :)
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I had the same situation. I started my blog on my iMac (Sierra OSX) then finished it on my Macbook Pro (also OSX). I published it from the Macbook. Next day when I checked the blog on my iMac, the blog had reverted to the draft that was on the iMac before I opened it on the Macbook. The only difference is that I had set it to be published on a delay, and I caught it before it was supposed to actually publish. No Revisions on either machine had the completed blog post. I reconstructed it from memory and some notes I had. Any help is greatly appreciated. I have done blog posts on both machines in the past with no problem. Thanks!
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We can’t even start to look into this without knowing the URL of your site, and preferably the link of the exact post that was affected.
However, it sounds to me like you’d edited the post from two different browsers, so it’s not the same issue as originally posted in this thread which concerns using a combination of a browser and the mobile app. The app saves changes locally, not online, but if you made a change on a browser it’s immediately saved online.
What it sounds like here is that your changes on the Macbook did not save properly, most likely because the connection was interrupted while the post was saving. That would also explain why there is no revision – it never saved.
When updating a post, draft or published, make sure you see the Saved indicator in the editor before navigating away from the editor or closing the browser tab/window. You can also try clearing the cache on the browser on the Macbook, to make sure there’s no stuck files in the browser cache that’s messing things up.
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Thanks, kokkieh, for your quick reply. The URL of the affected post is http://atravelfortaste.com/wpblog/blog/2017/06/01/denver-botanic-garden-and-spring-plant-sale/.
However, what you say about the situation being different is correct (browsers, not app). And the theory that the save was interrupted from the Macbook sounds logical and likely. But I SWEAR I saved it, though the evidence doesn’t bear that out. I’ll keep an eye on it in any case. So far it’s behaving for all the subsequent posts I’ve written. Thanks again!
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Thanks for the link :)
I see your site is using self-hosted WordPress, so it’s not actually on our servers and our processes don’t necessarily apply to it. Were you using the WordPress.com editor at My Site ->Blog Posts, or the editor in the WP-Admin dashboard for the site?
If you were using the My Sites editor, even if you manually saved it, if the connection timed out during the save it wouldn’t have completed. It should have still autosaved, but it sounds like in this case that didn’t happen. No system is perfect, unfortunately.
Given that it’s a self-hosted site the problem could also have been with our system connecting to your hosting provider’s servers.
But I’m glad to hear it’s been working since.
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