Automatic save when editing?

Sometimes I am editing a chapter and suddenly I loose everything I’ve just written because I pushed some button inadvertently and I get out of the editing page. That’s awful, of course.

Recently I discovered the following when I open again the editing page:
“The backup of this post in your browser is different from the version below.
Restore the backup
This will replace the current editor content with the last backup version. You can use undo and redo in the editor to get the old content back or to return to the restored version.”
That’s wonderful, of course.

It does not work always, however. Sometimes it seems that I’ve lost my edited page permanently, that there is no way to recover it. I’d like to know exactly what’s the inner mechanism(s) in Pressbooks, short of an automatic continuous saving like we have for instance in a Google-document, that can best save what I am painstakingly writing.

Pressbooks uses the WordPress “heartbeat” script which creates autosaves at a 60 seconds interval.
For the times when autosaves don’t seem to work for you, can you identify any patterns around that? This information would help us look into this further.

Thanks a lot, Mich, I’ll check it and report here.

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I tried a few things and the “heartbeat” script seems to work. I am discovering this new message that I missed to see before:
“There is an autosave of this post that is more recent than the version below.”
This is very reassuring. Thanks again.

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