This post is primarily intended for fellow bloggers, although casual readers and visitors to this site might also be interested, and may even be able to offer some advice. A most annoying thing happened yesterday evening, in fact it's something that has never occurred before in four years of blogging, and I hope won't happen again. I was putting the finishing touches to the post about my recent visit to the Great British Beer Festival, when the whole, quite lengthy post just vanished. I say "just vanished", there was some input from me in the form of clicking on the "undo" button on the toolbar, in order to re-instate a photo that had decided to delete itself after I'd re-positioned some text. The next thing I knew I was left with a completely blank dashboard, and before I could exit the post, without saving - so as to return to what had been there a few moments before, the auto-save function kicked in thereby saving a totally blank post!
I tried all sorts of options to try and recover my work, including looking back via the history function, but every time I tried it just re-hashed the latest (ie. blank) version of my post. I wasted even more time by carrying out various on-line searches along the lines of "how to re-instate posts that had been accidentally deleted", but all to no avail. It appears that if the post has been published, then there would be every chance of recovering it by searching for it, and then accessing it that way. However, if, as in my case, the post was only in draft form, then that's it, it's gone for good! Several people had pointed out that Blogger does not have a very good recovery option when it comes to dealing with situations like this, but what I want to know is why the wretched thing deleted itself in the first place?
I have used the "undo" option many times in the past without any problem, so why did my carefully constructed article just disappear into hyper-space? I would be pleased to hear from anyone who has had similar problems, and would be even more grateful if someone could tell me if there is a way to recover my post.
In the meantime I am re-writing my post on GBBF 2012.
4 comments:
Blogger has in my experience been eccentric in many ways. For example, if revising one of my pages, I'd find the preview button, which worked fine on posts, would make the page revert to an even earlier version of the text, which I found no way of reversing. I've got rid of most of the eccentricities by working on my blog only when I've accessed it in Google Chrome rather than via my usual homepage. I wouldn't have thought a different search engine would help, but it did.
I've lost things too and not got them back. Sad thing is your second version is never quite as good as your first.
The same thing has happened to be using 'control z' to undo. If I'm writing something long I copy and paste the html into notepad every now and then to keep a back up.
Thanks for the tips everyone. In the past I've written posts using Word and then copied and pasted the text into Blogger. You then have to remove all the formatting used by Word, but at least you've still got a back-up copy.
I think I'll give Ed's tip a try, and copy into notepad, as I don't think there's any formatting involved with that particular programme.
Tandleman, you are right; the second version is never as good as the first, as the intial enthusiasm has gone by then.
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