Hi Bridget!
I haven't personally had issues with drafts, but I also don't rely heavily on the drafts feature for extensive work. I'll share my reasoning and general strategy toward drafts here in case it helps.
Confluence should save your drafts, but if you've spent a significant amount of time on any changes, I'd recommend saving your work as you go. This is because there is no record of the changes outside the draft, and when a draft is deleted, it's gone. This opens up the possibility of losing your work due to a number of factors independent of the draft saving feature. As mentioned in the Drafts documentation:
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.
I think of it similar to writing a document in Microsoft Word: You can spend hours on a document without saving, and everything should be fine. You can even walk away, come back the next day, and it Microsoft word will "save" where you left off. However, if someone comes in that time and changes the document, or closes a window, or if your computer runs into power/connection issues, you run the risk of losing that work without any record of what's done.
Similarly, leaving hours of work in a draft in Confluence leaves the work vulnerable to being deleted or changed without a trace by another user. Additionally, without saving, you don't have any additional history of the document, so you lose the ability to know who added what content, and how to revert back to a previous version.
With that in mind, here are some strategies i use for saving drafts of work in Confluence:
- Using the draft feature – I do keep pages as a draft for small amounts of work. Usually, for example, if I start a page or edit, put a minimal amount of work into it, then maybe get interrupted and have to come back to it later. However, once a significant amount of work is put into a page that I want saved, I use one of the strategies below.
- Publish the page in a common space with "DRAFT:" in the title (e.g. "DRAFT: 2020 goals" – This is good if you want to be open about your work and let others see what you're working on, but want to be clear it's a work in progress. You can even use view restrictions if you want to limit visibility to a few collaborators.
- Publish the page in your personal space – This is great if you're working on the page alone and want to work on it before sharing with others. You can also set view restrictions here if you want to limit visibility to just you.
(You can also see similar tips for saving in the Drafts documentation linked above)
In options 2 and 3 above, I make incremental changes and save the page after any meaningful additions. This gives a great record of changes to see what work has been done on the document and what has changed over time.
I hope this helps!
– Zak
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