Clicked Close on a Draft and Lost My Changes - Any way to get them back?

[Leo Schmidt]

I was working on a draft Confluence Cloud page for several days.  Today, as I was about complete, I clicked "Close" to save my changes.  My browser froze and now it appears that I've lost all my work.  Is there any way to retrieve the "auto-save" file?

When I look in Drafts, I see my page, but it is the version from January 5 - week ago now.

[Diego · Accepted solution]

Hello there!
After I read your question, I understand that you have been working on a Page Draft for quite some time and your browser crashed before Confluence had a chance to update your draft to what is was displayed in your screen. Is that correct?

Currently, Confluence will display whatever is saved as a draft here:

1. Go to your Confluence Dashboard
2. Look under the “Recent” section
3. Select the “Drafts” tab
4. Look for the Page Title* you used for the draft

*Page title will display as “Untitled” if you did not give the page a title, like this:

Here is an excerpt from our documentation, @Leo Schmidt:

We recommend only keeping your work as a draft when it's in a very early stage. This is because changes can't be tracked in a draft, and you can't roll back to previous editing sessions - both of which you can do for published pages.

Instead, it's recommended you publish your page even while it's in mid-work, and do one of the following:

• Insert status element to mark your page work-in-progress — You can also change this to say under review, done, needs revising, looking for feedback, or any other step of your workflow.

• Move your pages as you work — If you've got an external facing site, or if your team is writing something like policies for the rest of your organization, you can work on them in your team space, and then move them to an external facing space once they're done. Alternatively, you can work on something in your personal space, and then once it's been polished, move it to the official space where it needs to be.

• Lock down pages until ready — Working on something that you don't want everyone to know about until it's ready? Lock down your page while you work on it, and only change the page restrictions once it's ready to go public.

This means that unlike published pages, Drafts are not versioned and there is no rollback option for them.

With this in mind, I wanted to check a few things with you:

1. Have you ever published this page at some point in the past?
2. After you started editing your draft, did you disconnect your device from the internet?
   If the answer to this is yes, you might have been affected by this bug:
   Draft is lost when offline editing and clicking close button when connected online

Let us hear from you!

[Leo Schmidt]

I believe I was a victim of this bug.

[Diego]

Thanks for sharing this with us. Since there is no workaround to this, the only recommendation I can give you right now is to avoid editing pages when offline.

I truly recommend you to watch the report I linked earlier. By doing this you will be kept up to date with everything posted there! Also, if you have the time, it would be really nice if you shared your use case there in the report and how this current behavior affects it.

Let us hear from you!

[Hans Christian Sander]

I think the Draft feature is useless as long as your draft is not kept and saved. A draft may prove to be really important and sometimes Confluence deletes it never to be recovered. Drafts are not versioned, there is no recovery possibility. Use only draft if it's something you know you'll never need again. For anything you need to be able to revisit, avoid.

When using Draft there should be a warning, all your work can suddenly disappear with no possibility of recovery.

[Andre Franchini]

Same happened to me, I lost 1 hour of work due to a draft not being saved.

It is ironic because they say this on the tooltip of the page! 

😂

[Dominic Lagger]

Hi @Leo Schmidt 

I think, when the draft isn't up to date, then the work is lost.

Last option would be to contact the atlassian support.

Regards, Dominic