Text Entry Box Draft Deleted After Saving

[APenaflor]

I am a student using Canvas. Two days ago, I had a text entry draft saved with over 900 words. I reloaded the page frequently to ensure the draft was saved. When I accessed the assignment today, the draft was not present. The work assigned by my teacher is long-form and suggests work over the course of multiple weeks, I had left the assignment saved in order to work on it later.

Why does this happen in multiple cases?

Why does this issue persist after years of complaints?

Is this due to poor design or storage of online files on Canvas?

Is there an unclearly stated limit to how long the drafts last? 

[Chris_Hofer]

Hi there, @APenaflor ...

Sorry to hear that you have lost a lot of text for an assignment.  I assume that you are following the information in this Guide to complete your text entry assignment:

How do I submit a text entry assignment?

In doing a bit of searching here in the Community, I found some release notes from almost two years ago, and there is a write-up on how to auto-save feature operates:

Canvas Release Notes (2020-03-21) - Instructure Community (canvaslms.com)

Make sure to read the information below the video as well.

If you have similar assignments like this in the future, you might want to write your assignments "offline" and then when you are ready to submit your work, paste in the text into the assignment and submit it to your instructor.  Better yet, if your instructor accepts file attachments such has Word documents or PDF files, you can write your assignment "offline", and then attach your file to the assignment for submission.

I hope this will help a bit.  Keep us posted...thanks!