Help! Accidentally deleted "Section" which then deleted all of my questions

  • 5 February 2021
  • 41 replies
  • 5424 views

After working on a new survey for 2+ hours, I realized that the template I’d been using had broken questions down into sections. I no longer needed this organization as all of my questions were now in one section together, so I clicked on the parent section and deleted it. It instantly deleted every question I’d been working on and now the survey is blank. Is there any way to pull up the history of changes so that I don’t have to start from scratch?! Seems like something that people might accidentally do often and hate that I can’t find any sort of option to undo.

john.desborough 2 years ago

+1 on this thread

 

Would love to be able to undo deleting!

@mary_lin - this comes from a user as well 

as someone who has done that on a couple of occasions already, i decided to take an ‘old school’ approach to trying to keep this from happening in the future, at least for me. 

In the old days before auto-save features and cloud replicated versions of files (excel and word docs were the usual culprits for me), you used to have to actually save your files and make backups - so that you could have the work saved and not lose things. I got lazy with all these newfangled products that did all this for me.. until i decided to change my first published form.. 

baammm

so now, I duplicate my forms and move the copy to a “Backups” workspace so that i a safety version of the file. Any time I am going to make a change to either question structure or logic and branching, I make a duplicate - even if i have yet to publish the form.. just to be sure. 

this won’t help me recover stuff i lose accidentally BUT if i can ingrain these habits in my approach to creating and managing my typeforms, i should lose a lot less. 

 

hope this offers some glimmer of a better practice until the recovery function might be avaialble.. 

des

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41 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +5

Hi @unioncampcollective - first, thanks for joining our community! :) 

Oh no! Accidentally deleting something is the worst. :( We don’t currently offer an option to restore a previous version, so I’m afraid the questions would be completely gone. Though, I’ll note this for our product team, as I’m sure there are others that have accidentally deleted something as well. This isn’t the best news but if there’s anything else I can help with, please let me know.

Userlevel 7
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having done this once myself and kicked my butt around the office, i decided that before i would do deletions like that, i would duplicate/copy and then make the changes in the original. with the copy serving as my backup.. 

too many times in google sheets and excel online when i could not trust the version history lol.. 

my tuppence

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +5

That's a very good point @john.desborough. Having duplicated forms would be the best way to make sure you don't lose all your work while Typeform doesn't have the option to undo.

 

Hopefully, this will change at some point in the future, but this is the safest option for any file you spend a good amount of time on it. 

 

Thanks for sharing that with us! 

PLEASE tell your product people about adding a “Restore version” feature

Very frustrated as I tried to change a question type, and it deleted all of the answer choices I so carefully crafted. And I was just about done. Not happy. 

 

@Liz 

Userlevel 7
Badge +5

@sarahjake Oh gosh! Definitely not the experience we want you to have. I’ve shared this with our product team. I also would like a restore feature, as I’ve accidentally deleted questions myself, too. :disappointed_relieved:

Nice, a days work gone because of some major product design idiocy.

 

Sorry to put it this undiplomatically but this reflects my feelings at this moment.

Badge +5

Hey @Vince R, I totally get your frustration - we’ve all been there. I also think a ‘restore version’ feature is a must. Regarding being undiplomatic, I think we all agree it doesn’t help anybody.

We’ll speak to the product team in order to understand why we don’t support this at the moment and whether there are plans to work on this in the near future. 

Hey Gabriel you are right and I apologize 🙏

Heat of the moment...

Badge +5

No worries, Vince. A day’s work is a long time and it’s a shame we cannot help you restore your typeform at the moment. If you need help with any other thing do let us know. 

+1 on this thread

 

Would love to be able to undo deleting!

Userlevel 7
Badge +6

+1 on this thread

 

Would love to be able to undo deleting!

@mary_lin - this comes from a user as well 

as someone who has done that on a couple of occasions already, i decided to take an ‘old school’ approach to trying to keep this from happening in the future, at least for me. 

In the old days before auto-save features and cloud replicated versions of files (excel and word docs were the usual culprits for me), you used to have to actually save your files and make backups - so that you could have the work saved and not lose things. I got lazy with all these newfangled products that did all this for me.. until i decided to change my first published form.. 

baammm

so now, I duplicate my forms and move the copy to a “Backups” workspace so that i a safety version of the file. Any time I am going to make a change to either question structure or logic and branching, I make a duplicate - even if i have yet to publish the form.. just to be sure. 

this won’t help me recover stuff i lose accidentally BUT if i can ingrain these habits in my approach to creating and managing my typeforms, i should lose a lot less. 

 

hope this offers some glimmer of a better practice until the recovery function might be avaialble.. 

des

Badge +5

Hey Des, (even if not ideal) I think that’s a great workaround. I’ll pin your reply for now until that feature becomes available so everyone can see how to go about this  :eyes:

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Learned this the hard way today...heartbreaking. I hope the new function is on the way.

Just did it too. It is so frustrating! Typeform team, you need to change this ASAP. This is a huge issue that has been brought up a few months ago. Although I like Typeform, I am not sure I want to pay $300 ayear for a tool that is not up to date. 

with that, still no undo delete?

Userlevel 7
Badge +5

Hi @Satoshi Thanks for stopping by the community. I wanted to let you know that I had to edit your post to remove some of the language. We understand your frustration, but we ask that the tone in our community is healthy and inclusive. 

While we don’t have this feature yet, this is something our developers are working on adding. If I have any further updates, I’ll post them here!

Yep. I just learned the hard way as well….reminds me of technology from 10+ years ago. Consider versioning, please.

Just wasted too many hours creating great stuff and inadvertently deleted all but one question. This was way too easy to do - without checks and warnings - and in the 21st century not being able to recover work is just dinosaurial. This constitute a fail in Computer Science 101. It’s the main reason I’ll be seeking other options.

 

Some designers and programmers need their butts kicked around the office. Am I happy?

this is seriously a dealbreaker.. I had all my long efforts gone in 1 click. I decide to discontinued my annual subscription until typeform add this functionality. 

 

so sad to see features requested 8 months ago, and becomes one of the most annoying pain point of the product and hasnt been resolved until today

 

I want to have my team to contribute as well and this is suppose to be a fundamental requirement to avoid human error. 

I also go to my account and hardly find the cancel subscription section. yikes.

 

the billing section has the ‘change subscription’ with NO option to cancel subscription, only to upgrade… 

 

can community team help to give this feedback to the developer please?

Just deleted a group of questions I've been working on for about 5 hours .
Im amazed there is no undo button. 

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I just changed the question type and lost all my carefully written answer options. Please please please build a restore or undo feature!!

Userlevel 7
Badge +5

Hi @csladden I’m afraid that once a question type has changed, the responses associated with the question will be deleted with it. You can read more about this here

We show a warning message to prevent this from happening. I will share this with product, but definitely take a peek at the article above for best practices on editing a form that has already collected responses. 

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I am actually describing the question being deleted, not the responses. My Typeform was not live, and not gathering responses; it was the answer options in the question that I lost. My question asked users to select all answers that were relevant, and there were 10 carefully worded options. It was this set of 10 answer options that I lost when I switched from multiple choice to try a different answer format, with no warning about losing the content. There really should be a warning on this, and ideally, an undo option!!

Userlevel 7
Badge +5

Hi @csladden Oh! I totally misread that. My apologies! You are right - we don’t have a warning for deleting questions, particularly before the form has been published. I’ll share this feedback with product, though, because that would definitely be handy to warned about. 

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