Recover a Page After a Failed Save Attempt or System Crash

Summary

Occasionally, network or database issues may cause problems with saving pages. The odds of this occurring seem to increase exponentially based on a) the importance of the document and b) how long you've been working on it.

How to find your draft:

In Confluence Cloud, collaborative editing is always active and Confluence auto-saves your work every 30 seconds. Use one of these paths to recover your content:

• Option 1 (recommended): Go to Home > Recently worked on tab. Look for pages with an UNPUBLISHED CHANGES or DRAFT lozenge — click the page to resume editing.

• Option 2: Click your profile picture (top-right) > Drafts. This displays all drafts you have saved. Select Resume editing on the relevant page.

Solution

Here's how to recover a page that you've been previously working on:

Option 1

When Collaborative Editing is ON

Unpublished Changes and Drafts will be shown in the Recently worked on tab from the dashboard:

ℹ️ The UNPUBLISHED CHANGES and DRAFT lozenges are not available when Collaborative Editing is turned OFF

When Collaborative Editing is OFF

Try creating a new page in the same space. You should see a banner that says:

Clicking "resume editing" will take you to the last draft saved for this page.

Option 2

This option works when Collaborative Editing is either ON or OFF.

In the top right of the Confluence window click on Your profile picture -> Drafts. This will display a list of all the drafts you have saved.

The pages shown in the Drafts menu have an option to Resume Editing or Discard.

When "Shared drafts" is specifically mentioned, this means the draft under this category is created before Collaborative Editing was turned OFF.

Learn more about Drafts here.

Verify your recovered content:

After resuming a draft, confirm the recovered content matches what you remember writing — Confluence auto-saves every 30 seconds during collaborative editing, so the last few seconds before a crash may not be captured.