A draft is a 'snapshot' of unsaved page content, which Confluence creates automatically at regular intervals while you are editing a page or blog post. This can minimise the loss of work if your Confluence site experiences a problem, since you can retrieve the page content from your last saved draft.

How do drafts work in Confluence?

At regular intervals, Confluence automatically saves a draft of the page you are editing. If a network failure or system error prevents you from saving your page, you can retrieve its last saved draft and continue working on the page from the last saved draft.

Drafts are created while you are adding and editing a page or blog post. Each new draft replaces the previously saved draft. By default, Confluence saves a draft of your page once every thirty seconds. However, a Confluence administrator can configure how often drafts are saved. In addition, whenever you edit a page and then move to another screen, Confluence will automatically save a draft.

When you edit the page again, Confluence will let you know that a version of the page you are editing was not saved and will give you the option to resume editing it.

Each time Confluence saves a draft, it displays a message and the time of the last save near the Save button on the edit screen.

On this page:

Related pages:


Screenshot: Message displaying the time when the draft was last saved

More about drafts:

  • A user only has access to the drafts of pages they have been working on and whose content has not yet been saved.
  • A user cannot create a draft explicitly.
  • A user's drafts are listed in the 'Drafts' tab of their profile.
  • Once a user has resumed editing a draft, or chosen to discard it, the draft is removed from their drafts tab.

Viewing drafts

Your drafts are listed on the Drafts tab of your user profile.

To see your drafts:

Choose your profile picture at top right of the screen, then choose Drafts.

Viewing your unsaved changes

While editing a page or blog post, you can view any 'unsaved' changes you have made since the last automatically saved draft, by clicking view change (near the Save button).

Screenshot: Segment of the unpublished changes window


  • No labels

Except where otherwise noted, content in this space is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia License.