HELP - Recovering important text from Quick Capture window after computer rebooted

Hello,

I will sometimes keep the Drafts quick capture window up for long periods of time as a sort of floating window scratch pad. In the middle of the night yesterday, I finally figured out the key to unlocking the entire structure of a book I’ve been working on, nearly outlining the entire thing over the course of two hours. I fell asleep on my couch, and my computer rebooted itself before I woke up. When I opened up the quick capture window again, only a few lines from wayyyy earlier in the day were in that quick capture note.

I’ve never really worried about hitting “Save” on the QC window, because it’s always persisted, even after reboots. There is no “version history” because it was never saved and thus stored as a note that could be accessed from the sidebar. I tried saving the few lines that were there as a note, to see if it would then allow me to access some kind of version history, but no luck – hopefully my saving it didn’t overwrite something now.

How does Drafts persist the text in a Quick Capture window? I assumed it was sort of “live-writing” to the file the way Obsidian does. Is there a way to access some kind of quick capture window memory in Drafts? I’m freaking out a little tbh :hot_face:

The quick capture window is meant to be transient. It does save the current state of the capture, but only if the window is closed or the app is quit. It’s not meant to be persisted in a fail-safe sort of way like active drafts are.

Not sure why your computer rebooted itself, but sounds like maybe it was not able to shut down cleanly, and the capture window was left open, so the content that was not saved. Had an orderly reboot occurred, Drafts should have been shut down by the system and the last state would have been saved.

I’m afraid there’s not way to restore that information.

Yeah, that’s what I thought. Where exactly does Drafts store data from the QC window to allow it to persist? What does it do upon being shut down by the system that allows that text to pop back up after an [orderly] reboot?

The implementation is a technical detail and not terribly important. The current value is snapshotted to be restored, mainly to work across the app being quit and relaunched.

Had the app been quit cleanly, it would have been snapshotted.

In the future, definitely plan on using the editor to work on any long-term content. Content is saved constantly while working in the editor.