Two users of Confluence were editing a page. The merge process failed. Draft recovery.

[Richard Lethin]

Two users were editing a page. 

The first user worked over several hours, developing an analysis, researching sources, and writing this into the page - but not saving intermediate copies.

The second user wrote two quick changes and saved them while the other user was editing.

Then the first user went to save the page of edits hours of work.  I don't know exactly what happened, but apparently the merge did not go smoothly and the first user clicked something and their page of hours of work appear to be lost.

Presumably Confluence saved versions of the Draft of the first user.   Perhaps they are available under the "Drafts" item when the first user clicks on their icon.  But if they are not right there - is there a way to see the intermediate automatically generated drafts, even to have an administrator grab a temp file of them on the directory of the server? 

I am not looking for the history of successfully saved edits, but rather the history and content of the automatically created intermediate Drafts.

Ideally there is an easy way to recover the work rather than have the first user repeat those many hours of work.

Any other advice?

Thank you.

(I should probably put in a suggestion for a feature in Atlassian for multiple editors on the same page to be shown simultaneously, like in Google Docs, so this bulk merge problem is not a future problem.)

[Bjorn Boisschot]

I'm a bit afraid the one colleague that wanted to undo his changes, actually did a discard changes to previous version. If this is the case, this means that he discarded all changes from all users working on that page. This is "normal" behaviour for COnfluence but is actually quite disturbing for users. Certainly because one person can delete hours of work of someone else.

I dont think you can recover any of his changes

[Richard Lethin]

I don't think it was so much "adversarial" in the sense that the first second user was informed that the first user had edits in progress, and figured that they'd get merged in automatically after he saved, and then the first user saved, as Confluence usually does.  So he made the edits he needed to make and saved them, while the first user was working.

But somehow later the first user's changes didn't merge in, or save, when the first user tried to save.  

Presumably the first user's changes were being saved automatically as Drafts before she tried to save.  I am trying to recover those Drafts, even if they don't appear when the first user looks for her Drafts.