Have you ever lost your text while working on a Connect post? The backup functions here on Connect are well-hidden, not very user-friendly, and pretty unreliable so I do prefer to use Google Docs when writing a longer post for Connect.
I decided to give the draft tool on Connect a test. Below you can learn how it went.
How to find your drafts:
- Open Connect in your browser
- Click on your profile photo (top right)
- Then click/tap on your username in blue text at the top
- Then click/tap the tab named Drafts
The Drafts tab is marked in the screenshots below. First on Computers and then on Android:
When you open the Drafts tab you will see this:
As you can see I only have one draft post on my list. When you later want to resume editing and maybe publish your draft, you need to open the draft by clicking/tapping on the post name (see the orange circle in the above screenshot).
Please note that when you reopen a draft, the selected section, the location, and the tags are lost and must be selected again.
The drafts can be created on your computer and then finished on your mobile or vice versa. This comes in handy if you for instance need to insert images from your phone.
So far so good!
But this is not a very reliable backup system.
When editing your text in the Connect editor, there is no button to save your text as a draft! I tried to see if opening the preview makes sure the latest changes get saved. Nope - that does not work. Nor does Crtl+s.
But drafts are saved automatically every âfewâ minutes. Unfortunately, there is also no easy way to check if your latest changes are saved. You need to wait for maybe 1 or 2 minutes and hope a backup was made! I found out that the only way to test if your draft is saved is to hit âBackâ in your browser. It feels scary to do. If the Back works and takes you to the previous page, then your text was backed up. If you see this warning text:
then your text is not yet backed up. In that case, you should hit Cancel and wait 30 seconds or so and try again. Do this until the âLeave site?â message no longer pops up.
Then your text is most likely backed up on Connect. But this is not super reliable. To be safe wait a minute or so after you made your last edit before hitting Back.
On the list of your drafts, there is a timestamp indicating when your document was last saved. Correction : please see the first reply below.
I have not seen saved drafts disappear randomly. But there is a timeout on Connect. If you run out of time, then a draft is not always saved (another reason to use Google Docs instead). You can choose to hit Back at the end of your editing session to test that your draft was saved.
Reply drafts
When opening the Connect editor to write a reply, you may see a message telling you that a draft of your reply was saved. You can then choose to Load or Discard the draft. This also seems a bit unreliable. I have experienced that the draft was older than the version I was editing!
Conclusion
Drafts on Connect exist, so if you lose some text it is certainly worth checking if (some of) your work can be recovered. But because there is no save button and way to check if your latest changes were saved, I will still be using Google Docs for writing longer posts and posts with illustrations.
Cheers
Morten
