For those who read my blog regularly, you know I’ve been writing and publishing posts daily for almost two years.
As I was writing today, something happened to cause my browser to freeze up. Nothing unusual. I’ve certainly had browsers freeze and crash before.
But what happened after I restarted the browser made me smile.
When I restored the browser window, I returned to the WordPress Editor to continue writing my post.
And that’s when I saw the notification message underneath Add New Post. First time I’ve ever seen this notification message.
I selected the Restore the backup link, and my post was restored. Nothing was missing. Happy day!
Autosave and Local Backup
I’ve had crashes while writing in WordPress in the past, but I’ve never encountered that notification message. Usually I recover from an autosave version and I continue writing my post.
So off I went on the Internet to search for the The backup of this post in your browser is different from the version below. Restore the backup. notification message.
From what I discovered in WordPress.org and WordPress.com support forums, the message is due to WordPress Autosave not being able to save the latest version of the post.
What caused Autosave not to be able to save post versions? Likely due to going offline.
And when that happens, a copy of the post is saved to the browser local storage. In my case, it was saved to my Chrome local storage.
When I selected Restore the backup link, WordPress restored the version saved in Chrome’s local storage.
Small Things Make a Big Difference
It’s a small thing, but having the ability to restore my post made a big difference to me. With no autosave version available, I was glad to not rewrite all the words in my post.
Developers obviously took time to think about the autosave process and provide a backup system in case the user is no longer connected to the Internet. Great work!
It looks like the feature has been in WordPress since version 3.6. Kudos to the developers involved in adding this feature to WordPress.
