WordPress app deleted the published versions of old drafts!
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On my phone, in the WordPress app I found two old drafts (local versions) of two published blog posts. Not wanting to overwrite the published versions, I trashed them. Then deleted them from the trash.
I went to my blog and found that when I deleted the obsoletely locally saved versions, the WordPress app deleted the published versions too!!! @#$%%^!!!!
I cannot find a way to fix this!
Can anyone help?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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What is the exact version of your app?
Please post this specific info here:
(a) Exactly what kind of device you are using to connect to the internet and to WordPress.com.
(b) Exactly which browser (and version of it) you’re using by checking here if necessary http://supportdetails.com/Then type modlook into the sidebar tags on this thread for a Staff follow-up. How do I get a Moderator/Staff reply for my question? https://en.support.wordpress.com/getting-help-in-the-forums/#how-do-i-get-a-moderatorstaff-reply-for-my-question Also subscribe to this thread so you are notified when they respond and be patient while waiting. To subscribe look in the sidebar of this thread, find the subscribe to topics link and click it.
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Hi!
(a) iPhone 7, running 10.3.2. (I haven’t done the update to 10.3.3 quite yet.)
Unfortunately, I updated the WordPress app last night so I’m not sure which version it was—maybe 8.1?—but it was the version immediately before the current 8.2. (It was current at the time.)
I also do updates/edits on a Mac Mini and an iPad, though the process that unquestionably killed my two published posts was deleting the old local drafts on my iPhone.
So, very likely irrelevant, but for completeness:
The Mac Mini(s) edits are done via:
– Safari (current version) under a nearly current OS (back 1 revision)
– Chrome (49.0.2623.112) under an old OS (10.6.8)
iPad edits are done via whatever WordPress app is most current at the time.I’ve nearly given up hope of getting my lost work back, but I have a faint hope.
Thanks so much!
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Hi there,
Deleting the draft from the app will delete the published post, yes, as it’s the same post. Your act of deleting is the most recent action performed on the post, so it’s the one that will be synced.
Instead of deleting, you should have just allowed the app time to sync with the web, in which case the draft posts in the app should have been updated to the published version.
If sync doesn’t happen automatically, it usually points to a connection error. Restarting your device would force a refresh.
What are the titles of the posts that were deleted? I see two recently deleted posts in the Trash folder. You can restore them from here:
https://wordpress.com/posts/trashed/pickleballjourney.wordpress.com
If those are not the ones, if you have their titles or perhaps their URLs where they’ve been shared somewhere, we might be able to find them via Google’s cache or in the Wayback Machine.
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://pickleballjourney.wordpress.com/
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Hi kokkieh!
Thanks for your insight.
To me, it wasn’t obvious that deleting a local old draft version would also delete the more recent published post.
If I may, my strong suggestion to avoid this causing grief for someone else is to provide a warning something like:
“Deleting a local draft will delete any more recent published version as well. Proceed? Yes/No”
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“A newer version of this post has been published. Do you wish to delete all versions of this post? Yes/No”
I’m not sure how long a sync should take. The drafts that I deleted were already a week old at that point. And while the app was in use and those drafts were on the screen, there was no indication that any attempt at syncing was happening.
So, another app suggestion would be to have an icon or verbiage indicating that a sync is in process. (That way, I could leave the app “running” assuming it has to be open and in use to sync, which seems to be the case.)
As for the two posts currently in the trash, those were random very recent ones I had to delete last night after copying them and republishing them to maintain the chronological order of the blog after previously rewriting and publishing what I could of the two lost posts.
And thanks for the suggestions for recovering. Unfortunately, I already checked those two options over the weekend and neither Google nor archive.org had the lost posts . . . BUT, I just looked again at Google using a title search and found one of the missing posts! AWESOME! The other lost post appears to have been too new to be cached, but still, I recovered the one I couldn’t rewrite! GREAT!
Thanks!
Andrew -
I’m not sure how long a sync should take. The drafts that I deleted were already a week old at that point. And while the app was in use and those drafts were on the screen, there was no indication that any attempt at syncing was happening.
Hmm. As far as I know, the moment the app was opened after you’d published the web version, the app version should have updated. But as I said above, that could also be because of a caching issue in the internet connection on your device. Restarting usually fixes that.
I’ll pass your suggestions around clearer messaging to our developers, though.
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If you have the exact link of the still-unrecovered post, you can also try searching for it here:
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Thanks, kokkieh. Unfortunately, I don’t have the exact URL. Your suggestions have been very helpful.
Andrew
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I’m glad if it helped.
Our developers are also looking into the sync and messaging issues, as it appears we’ve had similar reports in the past. We want the app to be trustworthy when it comes to the status it displays for your posts, so thanks for reporting this.
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