WordPress.com

1. ontheliner
   Member
   Jul 14, 2011, 2:18 PM

   Often, as you work on a post you may leave it a while while away researching. When you return to the post you then find the message : “There is an autosave of this post that is more recent than the version below. View the autosave”. But if you click this link, the dropdown warning first asks whether you really want to leave the current edit as changes may be lost.

   At this point - obviously you have not yet pressed the Publish button - there’s no way of knowing whether your last keystrokes from half an hour ago have been autosaved, so if you leave this edit you risk losing them - in order to find out what’s in the autosave version, which today for example was timed more than an hour before my last edits.

   Your support page in this topic says “Auto-save means you don't even have to worry about saving – just write.” Yet it also says “Each new autosave overwrites the previous autosave in the database.” So presumably not the edit on my screen? The autosave will be an older version than what I was working on half an hour ago. But can I be sure?! Even when you view the autosaved version, it’s usually impossible to detect differences between two versions given that all the HTML is visible.

   I’m finding this warning wastes a lot of time worrying about what I might lost! How often does Autosave refesh its copy?

   Blog: shapersofthe80s.com

   The blog I need help with is shapersofthe80s.com.

2. mmadfan
   Member
   Jul 14, 2011, 2:30 PM

   You can right-click and open the link in another tab/window.

   Likely the autosave holds nothing new, but is simply an automatically saved copy of what was in the post before you walked away -- or clicked to a different tab. As long as you have saved your draft before you left, your autosave will not have any more recent content than in the draft. If you forgot to save your draft before you went to do something else, then the autosave will have helped you by saving your most recent version.

3. ontheliner
   Member
   Jul 14, 2011, 3:15 PM

   I'm afraid that isn't possilbe, mmadfan. The Autosave link insists on opening in the existing window in my Firefox browser, whether or not you rightclick.

   The trouble is of course that when you momentarily look away from an edit - the phone rings for example - you don't always remember to press the Save button. But I can find no clear indication of how frequently the Autosave kicks in. As I observed today its last saved version was timed long before I had left the unsaved current edit onscreen, so my quandary was whether to stick with the onscreen draft, or dare to click Save on returning to it now and over-write the Autosave version.

   I've frequently been surpised to read a recently published post and realise this version was not my last edit!

4. timethief
   Member
   Jul 14, 2011, 4:31 PM

   Autosave functioning is described in the support documentation at this link.
   http://en.support.wordpress.com/autosave/
   Each time you click Save Draft Post or Page or Update a Post or Page, a revision is saved. WordPress.com will store the last 25 revisions for each page on your blog. Autosave - the changes you make are automatically saved every 2 minutes.
   See also: http://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/post-revisions/
   and http://en.support.wordpress.com/pages/page-revisions/

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