Recover changes to an Unpublished page
Asked by Tina Yeates:

I inserted a Snag It picture and all of my work disappeared. I tried back but it was gone. Page is unpublished. Confluence has been doing saves. Is there anyway to go back to a saved, unpublished version?


Answers:
author: Julius Hennig
body: I've got a similar problem, however, it just relates to text edits (in Confluence Cloud). I have edited a page for quite a while earlier today, but wasn't ready to publish it yet. As usual, on the lower bar it told me that Confluence saved the changes. But, after taking a break and coming back to the Confluence tab, everything was gone and back to a slightly previous state (not a complete reset, but like 80%). Is there any way to recover those edits?

comments: author: Marta Marciszewicz
body: The same exact problem here. I even shared the document with some of my team members for review, so the changes must have been saved for others to view them online. Once I came back to make final changes and publish it 90% of the work was gone. None of the solutions from the comments below worked for me, unfortunately. Is there any way to recover the changes made to the draft?


author: Emmy He
body: Same here!! I was so frustrated because the same thing happened to me( after an hour of work) and I went to Recent\>Draft but the page wasn't there!  

But I figured out how to retrieve the page I was working on! First, you will need to go to Recent\>drafts. Then, click on "Worked On". Once there, go to the link where the last page you worked on is. Once there, you should see a tag in gray "**Unpublished changes** ". You will need to click on the pencil icon and voila, you should now see all the changes that were made! Just go ahead and save the page and it should now refresh. ![Screen Shot 2022-08-31 at 10.04.33 AM.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/213751i564E351FDE38FC04/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Screen Shot 2022-08-31 at 10.04.33 AM.png")

comments: author: ssena
body: This worked for me!


author: Lauren Connolly
body: fab, thanks this worked well.


author: samantha.rozek
body: I was working on a draft and accidentally swiped left on the touchpad. Now the draft is gone. It appeared for a few seconds but then displayed a blank page. The Drafts section shows an empty page. How can I recover the hours of work I spent on this?


author: Aidan Millar-Powell
body: Same problem. Made some changes to a page and forgot to publish, came back later and closed it but the changes were lost. Absolute crap.


author: AnnWorley
body: Please try the Drafts option under your profile. You may access your user profile by clicking your avatar in the top right corner:

![Screen Shot 2017-07-11 at 1.48.38 PM.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/2966iB27D55FAF226B5B3/image-dimensions/133x313?v=v2 "Screen Shot 2017-07-11 at 1.48.38 PM.png")

comments: author: Tina Yeates
body: Not there. The only thing in drafts is a copy of it with only the picture I was tring to paste in.


author: Aidan Millar-Powell
body: There is no drafts section


author: Aurela Omaj
body: What worked for me was go to my chrome history from the day and time I edited that page (unpublished) and found the link to that edited page and it had all my changes. Phew. It wasn't in my Confluence drafts or anywhere. This was the only thing that worked.

Hope this helps someone.

comments: author: Aurela Omaj
body: TIP: The title in the history usually says 'Edit - (insert title of your lost page)'


author: Brett Paton
body: Thank You! I forgot to publish something yesterday after making extensive edits and your tip saved me - looking through Chrome's History.   

With there being no real manual save function, I kind of assumed it just kept it as a draft or something in edit mode and closed the browser. I think that might just be for unpublished stuff. So you just get used to the idea of not saving anything ever.


author: Wilson Aballey
body: Thank you ma'am


author: Lance Beasley
body: Worked for me too!!! Great fix!!!


author: Jason Chen
body: Just lost an hour to this. When I tried publishing an edit, I received an error stating that pages couldn't have identical titles. Then I stupidly and quickly closed the draft, trusting it to be saved so I could go back to it to publish properly.

For what it's worth, at least one other team member experienced the same thing today and lost their edits to another page.

Proper warnings should be provided if there is a service outage (i.e., telling people to save a copy offline before leaving the page), or proper offline support should be added.


author: Dylan Knowles
body: Just happened to our team as well. We even shared the Edit link, people saw the contents, worked on it for hours, and now just... back to a pre-edit state? No idea what happened but extremely frustrating.

comments: author: samantha.rozek
body: Atlassian was not very helpful in resolving this. I found it interesting that it shows I've attached an item to the document, but it's not appearing on the screen.

Good luck and hopefully you can recover something.


author: Shaun
body: How is this still a thing in 2021!?

comments: author: Aidan Millar-Powell
body: I suspect because Atlassian have made such a behemoth, that is so unmaintainable, that all their efforts go into maintenance code rather than what is reasonably expected in terms of feature addition.  

There are requests on this site for super basic things, dating back to 2017 that still haven't been instantiated.


author: asd.lopes
body: Same here, you need to fix it quickly... :\| I have work lost...


author: Justin Baer
body: I was stumbling around trying to find a way to recover a page that I had drafted up but lost because my laptop had a problem. I was able to go to Recent \> Drafts and find what I thought I had lost. Worked like a champ.  

![image.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/152986i2AB8E612700996A7/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "image.png")


author: Dave Symonds
body: You legend Justin


author: Lisa Paterson
body: Justin's fix is not working for me. :( I lost half a days work :(


author: Katrin Green
body: Justin you legend! I feel like I should buy you a coffee, you've just saved me!!