Unpublished Changes is misleading when it says 'Saved'. This needs improving.

Question

I've been editing a large design document over the past few months with a view to publishing the update as a new Version.

I added significant amount of new content and was reassured each time as the top toolbar said " 'Saved' (Every change is saved, the last changes was 1 hour ago)".

After a laptop crash, I return to editing and all of the edits have completely disappeared!

I'm not worried because I think I can just pull tham back from the Change History, only to find that I can't. There is no change history for unpublished edits. There are a number of forum posts with this exact issue dating back several years.

I had assumed the feature worked in the same way as Google Docs and other cloud platforms, and Confluence definitely suggest this to be the case. But clearly it isn't.

I don't really see an effective way around this aside from editing and approving offline and copying it all in at once, or making a duplicate document.

This behaviour needs to change, or at least to be made clear as it is very misleading to see your data is 'Saved' only to find it isn't.

Andy Gladstone · Answer

Page history is based on actual publishing, not the auto-saving feature. I am not sure why your draft isn't reflective of the latest auto-save, but there is no history kept of all changes made between publishes.

Matthew Yarwood · Answer

Hi @Andy Gladstone

Thankyou for the advice. The document was definitely in Draft status. I have checked Drafts and 'Recently Worked On' as advised by other Forum posts. Unfortunately there is no trace of any changes since November which is odd. It doesn't even show in my 'worked on' list, even though you can see the Image attachments I added in December (which are still listed and work fine). You can see me visiting the page under Analytics, but no record of what changes were made.

Is there was a way to view different 'save' versions of unpublished drafts?

Andy Gladstone · Answer

@Matthew Yarwood Welcome to the Atlassian Community. Sorry you have had a crash landing. It sounds like you never initially saved the document, which means it should still be in your Unpublished Drafts. Have you checked the drafts under your user name on the home page? If the document was in draft status, and the changes were being saved as you edited it, you should be able to find it there.