restoring changes

Question

Too many windows open, I overwrote a pile of work by saving an older page on top of a newer one. How do I restore the changes? (I looked in help and in this forum, and I am probably not using the right words, because I couldn't find anything - likely the moment I post this, a similar question will appear)

Answer 1

Open the profile in question, click on the Green Changes tab

Search for the profile that was merged away and open it in a new window. This should make everything lost available.

Comments

Thanks Tom -

So are you saying that I can't "restore" the old profile, I can just copy and paste the old info into the new profile?

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That's right, just as a profile cannot be deleted, it cannot be restored.  Cut and paste.

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I hope commenting is the proper way to get a response so I will try it.  I did exactly this same thing with too many windows open and saved old information onto new.  But I need some more details on the answer.  I go to the profile that got messed up.  I click on the Changes tab and I see a list of changes.  The top one is where I overwrote the good data so I click on the 'edited the Biography' link and I get two columns.  The right 'Changed Information' column is the current stuff which is the old stuff I accidently resaved.  The left column is the Previous Information which is the information I want back.

Now what do I do from here?  I try to select the first column to copy and as I drag my mouse down, it selects everything from both columns.  What is my next step to just copy the previous information so I paste it back?  Thanks,.

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I hope somene can step up and answer this, I'm over my head.  I'd try cut and paste to a Word file, select what you want to keep and reneter it in either a new profile or, if there is one available, a nearly blank duplicate.

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I have flagged the comments in hope that someone with greater knowledge will chime in!

Good luck :)

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I don't know that there's much expert advice that can be offered here, sorry. I don't know any better about cutting and pasting than Tom.

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Answer: you highlight the text on the left column (the text you "want back"). You select COPY. Then you return to the EDIT tab and scroll down to the narrative. Place your cursor in the narrative box, where you want the old text to be placed. Select PASTE.

is that what you were looking for?

Answer 2

I found a fairly nice work-around for me but it involves using Microsoft Excel.  If you follow the steps in my comment on the first answer you will get to a page that has the information you want to recover on the left side under Previous Information. 

 

Using your cursor, click to the left of Bio Changes and drag down to the bottom of the information you want to recover.  (It will select the data in the Changed Information column also but don’t worry about that for now.)  Then copy that with a Ctrl+c or right-click, copy.

 

Open Excel, right click in cell A1, and choose paste.  You will want to play with the width of the columns but what you will have is all the plus (+) signs in column A, the Previous Information will be in column B, the minus (-) signs will be in column C, and the Changed Information will be in column D.

 

Now just the previous information that you want to recover will be nicely stored in column B.  Simply highlight all the cells in that column and copy.  Now go back to your profile text box for the bio and paste it into place.  You may want to delete the bad information first or just select it and paste over the top.  It worked pretty slick for me.

 

Note:  If you don’t have Excel you can download Apache OpenOffice.  It is a free open-source productivity suite.  I tried using the OpenOffice spreadsheet but it had fits with the === tags.  It tried to make them a formula and gave me an error.  You will have to go to each cell that has a === tag and put an apostrophe (‘) in front of the ===.  Then it will treat it as text and you can proceed as explained above.