If you’ve noticed, when you are in the midst of writing or composing an email in Gmail or Hotmail, it will automatically help you save it in draft every few minutes. When you’ve finished composing and send the email, the draft will be deleted because a copy has been saved in your Sent folder. This is a great feature because there are many things that can cause the message to be unrecoverable. I have a mouse with 5 buttons and the side ones are for going back and forward. Sometimes the page will just go back by itself and I can lose everything that I typed. Yeah I dropped the mouse a couple of times or probably was too frustrated that I slammed the mouse on the table… But with the autosave to draft, I can always get back mostly what I’ve typed.

When my mouse goes bonkers and makes the browser goes back by itself during me writing a blog post, I am still safe from it because WordPress is bundled with the open source HTML WYSIWYG editor TinyMCE, and if I hit the back button, I will get a warning saying “Are you sure you want to navigte away from this page? The changes you made will be lost if you navigate away from this page. Press OK to continue, or Cancel to stay on the current page.“.

Last week I lost about 90% of what I’ve written on Avira and I was really upset about it because I’ve spent the whole day testing and writing about it. Wordpress has a built-in auto save draft feature as well but it didn’t work because so coincidentally the site was having some down time. When I hit the Save Draft button for final saving and the page went blank. Hitting the back button gave me an empty draft! To prevent this from happening again, this is what I’ve implemented.

I have 2 choices, either to use a desktop blog-publishing application or a Firefox plugin.

I found out that Windows Live Writer has a feature where I can automatically save draft to my local computer. So if the Internet or the website is down, I will still have a recoverable local copy of the draft on my computer. However this feature is not enabled by default. You will need to go to Tools > Options > Editing > check “Automatically save drafts every X minutes”.
Save Local Draft in Windows Live Writer
Never lose what you’ve written ever again! Well this is useful only for those that uses blog providers such as Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal, Movable Type, dasBlog and etc. It won’t work on emails or any other web forms.

[ Download Windows Live Writer ]

Another method would be using a Firefox plugin called Lazarus. It enables you to recover lost forms with a single click. Lazarus securely saves forms as you type, allowing you to safely recover your lost work after server timeouts, network issues, browser crashes, power failures, and all the other things that can go wrong while you’re entering forms, editing content, writing webmail, etc, etc, etc…
Recover lost form data with Lazarus
You will of course need a Firefox browser and then install Lazarus plugin. It works right out of the box but then you can configure the extra Options to suit your needs.

[ Download Lazarus Firefox Plugin ]

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