Support » Fixing WordPress » Is data or keystrokes stored anywhere…????? HELP!!!

  • I’m out of my mind at the thought that I just lost hours and hours of working on a post, because I accidently hit SAVE AND CONT. EDITING, when I shouldn’t have. HOURS of mindnumbing work is lost. I hit the undo (Command Z) after I noticed my mistake, but that didn’t do anything. Is there somewhere in Firefox’s cache that all my keyboard strokes might be saved, something, anything? How would I get to that? Is it possible?

    I’m going crazy. Help.

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)
  • It just saved what you did as a draft. You should find it at the top of the write page, listed as a draft….

    Thread Starter zenpop

    (@zenpop)

    No, I know that…about it being saved as a draft. I’d been working in the program, in that mode, adding things and then saving them to view at the bottom of the page to see what they’d look like finished. But then I added a hunk of text copied over from an email, but in doing that wiped out a huge chunk of work, when I pasted in the text over that hunk of work unknowingly. I hit save and then…well, here I am.

    Ah. Well, that’s an entirely other thing. The only thing you might try is the back button through previous pages. If that doesn’t turn up a page with the earlier info still showing, them you may be screwed.

    And while some pros may scream and yell, I highly recommend writing your posts in a text editor with spell check and other features, so you can save it as you work along the way. When it is ready, then you can copy and paste it into your Write Post Screen.

    I work in WordPerfect, but then I’ve totally changed all the quick corrects and auto correct features that turn every quote into curly cute things and such, which if kept in the file you post in your WordPress site, will turn into strange characters on the screen or, worse yet, bork your whole set up.

    If you are a maven at WordPerfect and your word processing program and you understand what I’m talking about, then you can use it. If not:

    DO NOT USE A WORD PROCESSING PROGRAM FOR WRITING POSTS

    Just echoing the words of many of the other support mavens around here. They have to fix what gets screwed up when using word processors.

    Otherwise, find a really good text editing program and try that.

    Yep. I recommend Notepad2…. even though I AM a wordperfect maven!

    Thread Starter zenpop

    (@zenpop)

    Can you guys move your word processing comments somewhere else — start a new thread maybe. I’m near tears right now and don’t need to read semi-scold flavored advice about what I SHOULD have done, I’m waiting to see if someone comes across my post and has info directly related to what I’m asking about — not what I should have done. Thanks.

    WordPress does not save previous versions. If you can’t page back using the “back” button (as I suggested above), there’s probably no way to recover what you overwrote with copy n paste.

    Thread Starter zenpop

    (@zenpop)

    Thanks vkaryl, that’s what I dreaded and suspected. I was hoping someone who knew about Macs would tell me something like: “There’s this great little-known fucntion in Mac where you can go back and see keyboard strokes…” Or some wishful thinking thing like that. God, I’ve learned my lesson. The hard way. Ugh.

    Oy…. I’m sorry. Believe me when I say, I was speaking from experience…. it does only take once. As to being on a Mac, while there are many things that Macs do far far better than PCs, I don’t believe that reading minds is one of them unfortunately.

    Take a deep breath and try to rethink where you were. Make some notes about things you’d already covered in the lost post. That may help you recover some of the other things that you now think are gone forever. Look back at the email you copy n pasted from; that may further jog your memory by reading the whole thing rather than the part you used.

    A last thought: even though things aren’t very bright and cheerful right now, consider that you no doubt still know the BASIS for what you had previously written, and consider whether you might even be able to say what needs saying in a better way….

    Best of luck to you.

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    Volunteer Moderator

    I’m sorry, unless a malicious individual installed a key logger on your computer (as of now, there are none for Mac OS X), your work is lost. It happens to most of us at least once. It happened to me twice before I decided to use a plain text editor to write my larger posts.

    For future reference, (I know everyone’s said it by now) I highly recommend writing large posts in a plain text editor. If you like to see which ones we prefer to use, here’s a community-compiled list: http://codex.wordpress.org/Glossary#Text_editor

    There was no scolding involved, only information. We have to all learn from our mistakes. You are not alone. I’ve done the same thing a few times myself. We all do.

    The reality is that when you hit SAVE AND CONTINUE EDITING, the information is then saved to the database. As vkaryl said, unless you can hope that your browser might have stored the information in its cache, there is nothing you can do about it.

    I had problems with one of my laptops when my wrist would accidentally hit the touch pad and the cursor would jump around and I would mindlessly be typing, having just either typed everything in the wrong place or somehow selected and deleted a ton of stuff. Since I would look up and see what I was typing, not knowing I’d just wiped out a bunch of stuff because the editing window in WordPress was so short, I’d save it, post it, and then see either a mess or half the information completely gone when viewed on my site. You are not alone in this, and I tried everything, including lifting up the laptop and shaking it (I don’t recommend that, by the way. 😉 but it felt good.).

    If you hadn’t hit the save, you might have been able to back your way through undos, but how far your computer saves it’s undos is another issue.

    Not that it helps this case, but I think there’s been discussion about keeping some number of historical edits in the database. Might be useful to at least keep one edited copy back in ‘time’, and give the user control over clearing that ‘cached copy’. But I think they were talking about having a few versions stored (delta diffs of text is REALLY small to store…).

    -d

    There may not be a solution for what’s already done, but in regards to future need:

    http://www.watershedstudio.com/portfolio/software/wp-versioning.html

Viewing 13 replies - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)
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