Can a Confluence page content be lost page due to rename?

Question

A user who had been creating a page as "page a" realized that they wanted to replace "page b" with the content of "page a".  The user decided to do this by deleting "page b" and then renaming it "page a".  Following this, somehow the content of the original "page b" was restored by another user and it seems the content of the original "page a" is not available from the Confluence UI.  Any tips on how I can track this down?

Mick Davidson_o2ws6w · Answer

I agree with Jonathon on No 2, I've done that with pages that have been renamed: somehow one gets hidden.

Also, is the user's browser still open or have the closed it? If so, you should just be able to use the Back key to work your way through it's history until you find the right one. If you do, I'd copy the contents to another new page and save that with an entirely different name, at least until the problem's been resolved.

I've noticed in some browsers (Chrome or FireFox are what I normally use) that if you do a 're-open recently closed browser' (or something similar, you not only get the browser but it's history too, so all may not be lost.

Good luck. :)

Jonathan Simonoff · Answer

My guess is that both pages actually still exist, but with the same name. Under the hood, pages are really identified by their ID. When you access a page using its name, Confluence looks up the page ID -- what's happening is that the restored page is hiding the renamed "page a". This happend to a user of mine a while ago, and I remember that I was able to recover the hidden page, though I'm not sure exactly how I did it. A couple of ways you might be able to deal with it: 1) By examining the browser history for the user to renamed "page a" you may be able to determine the page ID. Then you can access that page with a URL /viewpage.action?pageId=. 2) If you rename (or delete) the "page b" that you can see, the one that was renamed from "page a" may become accessible with the "page b" URL.