Dashboard spontaneously lost recent edits

I was playing around with Groups, Scenes, and dashboard buttons tonight. After I was done with dashboard edits done on a desktop browser, I verified everything looked cool on my Android phone and iPad mobile apps.

A couple hours later, I was showing my wife the new buttons for the lights on HER iPad, but ... they were all gone. The dashboard looked like it did before the new work.

I opened my iPad. Dashboard looked good, new buttons were visible. So now I have 2 mobile apps that are not in sync.

Then I checked the local web version -- changes were lost there. Reloaded the dashboard on my iPad -- now it's in sync with the web, with the new work lost.

I do not need to recover the work. I can recreate it. It was just a few buttons.

But how can I stop this from happening in the future? I am positive there were no other web browser sessions open which could have re-saved an old version of the dashboard. There were 3 mobile apps open, though. As far as I can tell, the dashboard just spontaneously reverted to a former state in between views.

Losing work sucks and I really want to understand how this happened.

Make sure all dashboards are closed down on all your other devices, ie close the browsers.

I had it once in reverse I cocked up a dashboard and used an open one to recover

I agree with @mark.cockcroft, I often have multiple windows open on multiple devices to check how what I am doing looks on different OS/devices. If you get the refresh order mixed up and it revert on you, but rare. Be sure to close open dashes on the app as well (I don't use the app for dashes anymore). As you dashboard get more complex I highly recommend backups.

Either copy your existing dashboard JSON to notepad (or similar), or use it to create a second "draft" dash and edit that one. Once things are prefect copy the JSON back to the main dash and update your Notepad backup. That way even if it gets messed up you'll always have the current Notepad copy you can just cut an paste to create it instantly.

Never blame a machine for something a human can prevent. :wink:

Is that just the "Layout" code seen when navigating to the Gear icon, then Advanced?

Correct, that is the JSON. The code contains everything need to recreate that dashboard on that hub.

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