How to save your Blogger blog posts from an unwanted autosave?
Many bloggers whose blogs are on Blogger platform have shared their dismay on the web about their posts disappearing while they were working on them. A friend said, she selected the text that she had composed over a week, something happened on its own and the next moment there was nothing on the post. Such experiences can be frustrating.
The culprit is AUTOSAVE that comes by default on the Blogger platform, and you cannot avoid it. When you face sudden disappearance of text on a post, what happens is that you accidentally select the text and delete it (or you cut the text for pasting it elsewhere) and AUTOSAVE saves the post at that very moment. It saves the blank post and your text is gone!
1. Quickly press Ctrl+Z (on Windows computers) or Undo (on iOS/ Mac) many times.
If you press 'undo' or Ctrl+Z on the keyboard, that works only for a few seconds because if in the meantime AUTOSAVE has saved a new version, the actions before that cannot be taken back.
2. Open a document (e.g. a MS Word doc) and give Paste command (Ctrl+V on Windows). It will paste the content if it was cut (not deleted) and is still stored in the clipboard.
3.Go to History on the browser and try to retrieve a previous version of the post. Often not very useful but worth trying if nothing else works.
4. You can also try clicking on the 'Previous' icon/ button next to the address bar on the browser. It also seldom works as AUTOSAVE works really fast.
5,6,7,8. These ones work fine if you had a published post but you accidentally removed its content and then saved it. Go to the cache of the browser and look for an older version. Or go to archive.com and ask for back versions of that page, which might have been saved by Archives.com a few weeks/ months back. Or, if you had been working on the same computer and have not cleared the browser's history for some time, you could find the previous saved version in it. Or, you could ask one of your subscribers (if you have a subscription widget on the blog through which others can subscribe to your posts) or email friends (if you send them an email after you published a post) to send you the post they received from you.
1. Open a new blog and make it private (Settings> Basic> Privacy). Compose a post. Keep its settings (font and its size, alignment etc) as similar to the main blog as possible. Now publish it. (The post will be published but will be visible to you only.)
After that, you can keep making modifications to this post. After each session, 'Update' it rather than 'Revert to draft'.
Autosave does not work on a published post and so your post remains as it is!
However, keep Updating it at intervals so that your edits are not lost due to power failure etc.
For transferring the post to the main blog, open the post in HTML mode, copy the content and paste it into a new post on the main blog. (Open that post also in HTML mode.)
2. The other, some swear it to be much better, way to avoid accidental loss of post content is to compose posts in a blog editor. We tried a number of free blog editors and sought bloggers' comments on them, and found Open Live Writer to be the best. However, all may not feel comfortable with an editor outside of Blogger.
3. You can also use Google Docs to compose posts. [A great tip: If you want to make complex posts, for example with table, Google Docs is a good way to go. Otherwise you have to put HTML codes into the post.
We don't find it a great idea to use MS Word or other word processors for composing blog posts. When you copy the composed text into a Blogger (or Wordpress) editor, all the commands and characters associated with the word processor are also copied. Our experience even with saving web or blogging versions of MS Word was also not satisfactory.
The culprit is AUTOSAVE that comes by default on the Blogger platform, and you cannot avoid it. When you face sudden disappearance of text on a post, what happens is that you accidentally select the text and delete it (or you cut the text for pasting it elsewhere) and AUTOSAVE saves the post at that very moment. It saves the blank post and your text is gone!
How to retrieve post content on Blogger blog?
Google/ Blogger has no provision for undeleting post content. You can take these actions if you have accidentally lost content from a blog post on Blogger:1. Quickly press Ctrl+Z (on Windows computers) or Undo (on iOS/ Mac) many times.
If you press 'undo' or Ctrl+Z on the keyboard, that works only for a few seconds because if in the meantime AUTOSAVE has saved a new version, the actions before that cannot be taken back.
2. Open a document (e.g. a MS Word doc) and give Paste command (Ctrl+V on Windows). It will paste the content if it was cut (not deleted) and is still stored in the clipboard.
3.Go to History on the browser and try to retrieve a previous version of the post. Often not very useful but worth trying if nothing else works.
4. You can also try clicking on the 'Previous' icon/ button next to the address bar on the browser. It also seldom works as AUTOSAVE works really fast.
5,6,7,8. These ones work fine if you had a published post but you accidentally removed its content and then saved it. Go to the cache of the browser and look for an older version. Or go to archive.com and ask for back versions of that page, which might have been saved by Archives.com a few weeks/ months back. Or, if you had been working on the same computer and have not cleared the browser's history for some time, you could find the previous saved version in it. Or, you could ask one of your subscribers (if you have a subscription widget on the blog through which others can subscribe to your posts) or email friends (if you send them an email after you published a post) to send you the post they received from you.
What to do to avoid accidentally erasing a post on Blogger blog?
Here is a very simple workaround, but you need to discipline yourself to do that. Moreover, this is a preventive action, not something that you can do if the post is already erased: |
| How to use a poxy blog to avoid autosave in Blogger |
After that, you can keep making modifications to this post. After each session, 'Update' it rather than 'Revert to draft'.
Autosave does not work on a published post and so your post remains as it is!
However, keep Updating it at intervals so that your edits are not lost due to power failure etc.
For transferring the post to the main blog, open the post in HTML mode, copy the content and paste it into a new post on the main blog. (Open that post also in HTML mode.)
2. The other, some swear it to be much better, way to avoid accidental loss of post content is to compose posts in a blog editor. We tried a number of free blog editors and sought bloggers' comments on them, and found Open Live Writer to be the best. However, all may not feel comfortable with an editor outside of Blogger.
3. You can also use Google Docs to compose posts. [A great tip: If you want to make complex posts, for example with table, Google Docs is a good way to go. Otherwise you have to put HTML codes into the post.
We don't find it a great idea to use MS Word or other word processors for composing blog posts. When you copy the composed text into a Blogger (or Wordpress) editor, all the commands and characters associated with the word processor are also copied. Our experience even with saving web or blogging versions of MS Word was also not satisfactory.
