Content Disappearing in Rise

Unfortunately, the link you provided is broken. The page is no longer available.

I am testing the product and getting ready to make a recommendation about adoption. If this issue is not resolvable than I can not recommend articulate as a stable product. This is unfortunate as there are a number of positives about articulate.

Thanks for responding. I appreciate it.

Amanda J. Rockinson-Szapkiw, Ed.D.

Sent from my iPhone

Hi Amanda,

The saving of the Rise course is automatic and should occur as you're working on and editing a Rise course. The link Wendy was pointing to is updated here (had some extra characters in it).  

As far as using the Browser back button, have you tried going back to the main menu screen for Rise and then choosing that course again to view/edit? The back button may have been showing you a cached copy but you shouldn't have lost any of the edits or changes you'd be making.

If you'd also like our Support team to take a look at your account we're happy to do so. You can connect with them here. 

Ashley,

Thank you for the updated link. I read and found this last night. Unfortunately, I am using an updated browser, and I did attempt to log back in. The saved version of the course was the initial setup version.

I appreciate your assistance and ideas.

Amanda

Did you also reach out to our Support team so that we could take a look at your course and/or your Articulate ID account? 

Thank you for your response. I have an they can not seem to resolve the issue. I am hoping the system has version history on your end and that all the work can be restored.

Amanda J. Rockinson-Szapkiw, Ed.D.

Sent from my iPhone

Thanks Amanda and I see your case with Renato so I'll reach out to him as well to ensure we're all on the same page. 

I too just lost a whole day of work!

Hi Brenda,

Thanks for reaching out here and I see you also posted in this forum discussion. I wanted to let you know that we've got your Support case and our team will be in touch about next steps with your files. We'll also keep you posted in this forum discussion and as a part of your Support case. 

Brenda,

I am so sorry to hear this.

I contacted the Support team as recommended. Unfortunately, they were not
able to trouble shoot the issue nor were they able to restore the lost
content.

I did some trouble shooting of my own using different accounts, browsers,
and computers. I was able to replicate the issue I had.

The site saves your work every .5 seconds. However, if you hit the back
button, the browser takes you back to a previous version of your work. That
version then saves over all the work completed; you then lose your work.

I asked if the software has a version history feature, hoping that the
technical support could revert my work back to a previous version. After a
few days, I was informed that the Rise software has no such feature. All my
work was lost

So, I have learned 2 things:

1) Put a sticky note on my computer reminding me "Do not hit the back
button."

2) Export my content every hour. (Note: I have not corresponded with the
support team to determine if there is an import feature for Rise. If not,
exporting my work would at least provide access to the content in html
format for editing).

I made the request that Articulate add version history, save, and import
features to Rise. Without these functions, the software is not user
friendly and not something I would recommend using to students, faculty,
and Instructional Designers for large projects, as the risk of losing work
is too high.

I am hoping to see some responsiveness and additional development on this
product.

Amanda

Thanks for your comments Amanda. This is the 5th module I have built/worked on with Rise and never had the issue before. I think it was more than just the back button, as too many lessons/titles were all gone at once. I agree, without adding a version history I am extremely hesitant to build anything else in Rise.

Brenda

Hey, Brenda.

Thanks so much for working with us privately to restore your course today. It looks like you're in good shape to complete your content this afternoon.

To reiterate our email conversation, it seems that the problem may have happened when the course was open in multiple tabs, and it looks like an older version of the course became saved on top of the latest version of your course. The lost content could also have been caused by using the back button, as Amanda suggested.

In any event, those are common behaviors that we want to protect against, so we're working on permanent fixes that will prevent data loss in the future.

Thanks again for working with us as we restored your course, and I do apologize for the trouble.

Yes, thank you so much to the whole team for restoring my work!! Much appreciated. Looking forward to a fix that will prevent loss of work.

Thanks Again
Brenda

Hello, I seem to have had a similar issue with lost work from this morning...possibly becvause I closed down the wrong browser tab. I'm using Chrome, latest version. Can someone please look into restoring my work from earlier today?

Thanks for letting us know about this, Jon.  We're working on a feature to help prevent this, and we'll look into restoring your content in the interim.

We need to collect some specific details from you, so I've submitted a Support Case on your behalf, and we'll reach out to you for those details very shortly.  Hang tight.

Hi all,

Does anyone have an idea how long it takes to resolve this type of issue one way or another? I submitted a support request on Friday & provided the required details, and have been told there is no time frame available, nor has anyone explained how to avoid losing material like this in the future. I've received no response back to my last email about this, hence the post here.

Similar to Amanda, our team is trying to make a purchasing decision, and it's a bit difficult when you can lose 2.5 hours of work for no apparent reason, and then can't get a satisfactory response as to when or if it can be recovered.

It's fancy to have automatic saving and all, but I would take an old fashioned save button any day of the week if it meant avoiding this kind of issue. Rise is otherwise lovely to work in, but losing material like this is a bit of a dealbreaker.

Thanks, Erin

Hello Erin - It looks like Emily responded to you via your case.

For anyone following along, this is something our team is actively working on and testing.

This thread is attached and we will be sure to update all of you here when applicable.

Hi Erin, 

I saw your case was escalated to my colleague Emily and she filled you in on some additional fixes our team is working on to resolve this issue. As she shared, we have seen this happen when folks are using the back button, or having Rise courses open in multiple tabs. When either of these occur, the course is over written with the current open window. We'll keep you posted once that update to Rise is rolled out, and in the meantime our team is working on recovery and restoring of the existing Rise course. Emily will continue to keep you posted on that in your support case. 

Good Morning, Erin.

I need to let you know that we've been unable to recover the work you lost.  I apologize for the lost information, and I want to explain why this happened.

Why was your work lost in Rise?

We're seeing work lost in Rise when an older (or different) version of a course is saved on top of the current version of the course.  Most often, this seems to happen when the course author (1) has a course open in multiple tabs (or multiple browsers), or (2) uses the back button.  We think these are both reasonable things for course authors to do, and we think that customers should expect us to safeguard their data when they do either of these things.  So, we view this as a bug.

What are we doing to prevent lost work?

We're introducing a new course locking feature that will prevent work from being lost in this way.  Moving forward, Rise will prevent course authors from inadvertently editing courses in more than one place, and we're hopeful that we can release this feature by early April.

Can lost work be recovered?

With very few exceptions, when a customer has lost work due to the bug I described, we've been able to dig through backups and transaction logs to successfully recover the content.  In this case, our logs were truncated.

Why couldn't we recover this specific body of work?

Our inability to recover this course was related to its size (in number of lessons).  Although the course didn't consume an excessive amount of disk, it seems our transaction logs had trouble with the volume of lessons and text.  Although course locking should prevent lost work in the future, we're simultaneously looking into ways that we can make provisions for larger courses.

Why did it take so long for us to figure out that we couldn't restore this lost work?

Honestly, we didn't want to accept failure on this.  We've been trying to figure out alternative ways to restore your content since we discovered that your data wasn't in our logs, but we decided last night that we needed to refocus our efforts on prevention.

I hope this helps to inform your buying decision, and please let me know if you have other questions.  We'll also respond to your Support Case directly in case you'd rather have a private conversation on this, and we'll update this forum thread as soon as the course locking feature is released!

Justin, appreciate the detailed response as we've just noticed this issue occuring to our content today.

Since our creative shop is really 'collaborative', a lock feature sounds like a great way of preventing this issue.

Ideally, a focus on how teams work, and implementing shared team development (looking at other cloud base apps as an example such as Google Drive and 365) perhaps there are some huge opportunities here to make Rise a true Team based authorware product.

Hi all,

Thanks for your patience as our team worked through this one. A Rise course can only be opened and edited in one browser window, so if you had used the back browser button or tried to open it in another one it was resulting in that loss of data and we just pushed out a fix for that issue!  The full list of Rise updates in this release are in our version history here.

Now, when you open a course that's already being edited in another browser window, you’ll have the option to take control of the course. Taking control immediately locks the first version of the course. This prevents one version from accidentally overwriting the other, which could cause data loss.

If you'd like to refer to an existing lesson while you're building another lesson in the same course, use the shareable web link for your course to view it in one browser window while you're editing it in another.

Thanks again, and let us know if you need anything else! 

I looked up this forum to get an idea of how Rise saves work; working on my very first Rise project for a client and trying to look at all contingencies, circumstances that may affect my deliverable. Very glad I took time to review these comments so I'm aware of what to look for. I don't like not being able to click "save" for self assurance...or see an auto save of some kind so its taking some getting used to! Thanks everyone for sharing in this forum. 

Greetings - I had a whole series of lesson blocks, that were saved the previous day, disappear completely, wiping out a couple hours work. It happened when I was trying to delete one tab from a 3-tab interaction. So I wasn't even trying to delete a block, I was only trying to delete an element within a block.

All the blocks within the lesson disappeared, but the lesson title remains in the overview menu. When I click on the title, the lesson with title comes up, but the content has disappeared, and navigation is frozen, not allowing me to navigate anywhere else. I am unable to add any new blocks, the Back button does not respond, the Preview button does not work. The only thing I can do within the screen is unhide the author. I shut down the browser and repoened, but the work has not reappeared.

Any way I can get the content back? Thank you.

Hi Toby, 

I'm sorry to hear about your missing content! I'd love to have our team look into your account and see what happened. I'm going to open a Support case on your behalf - so keep an eye out for an email from Support@articulate.com. 

Can you also let me know what browser(s) you saw this freezing issue in? I'd want to make sure that you were using one of the Rise browsers here. 

Hello Ashley, I am using Google Chrome Version 59.0.3071.104 (Official Build) (32-bit).