Manual saves, cloud autosave, and unpublished edits

Documentation / Saving, recovery, and troubleshooting

Manual Save and editor cloud autosave serve different purposes. Manual Save updates the page's canonical content. Cloud autosave preserves unpublished edits for later recovery; it does not change the page's availability or silently publish the draft to visitors.

Read the save status

For eligible production pages, autosave starts after a ten-second pause following an edit, with a maximum wait of 30 seconds during continuous editing. Changes not yet saved and Saving to cloud... are not confirmation. Saved to cloud appears only after the server acknowledges that snapshot.

Selecting an editable area without changing content does not create a draft. Edits made while a save is in flight are queued. Temporary failures can retry, but a conflict stops stale writes rather than overwriting newer saved edits.

Save intentionally

Use Save for the visible content you want to commit. Explicit saving temporarily blocks editing with Saving changes.... Ordinary successful content saves can keep the editor open with its current selection and scroll position. Structural changes and some recovery operations can refresh the page instead.

If you close or reload with unconfirmed changes, heed the browser warning. A background save when hiding a tab is best effort, not a substitute for an acknowledged save.

Know the exclusions

Local development uses explicit disk saves, not production cloud recovery. Templates and template-bound pages retain autosave exclusions. Custom source is read-only in the visual body editor and uses separate authoring controls.

Disable cloud (R2) draft autosave leaves manual Save available and does not delete existing drafts. Normal live visits can hide draft offers while it is disabled; explicitly opened recovery remains distinct. Browser local storage is not the supported draft-recovery source.

Assistant direct page updates also save immediately without using cloud drafts. See agentic editing and connections and saving and recovery.