Pepp38

Autosave solves the obvious failure modes in client-side apps. Input persists, refreshes are handled, drafts come back.

But there’s a quieter edge case that seems harder to deal with: sometimes the restored state is already invalid.

Not because data is missing, but because invariants are broken: derived fields out of sync, schema changes, partial or out-of-order updates.

In those situations, retries and small heuristics tend to reproduce the problem. Restoring the latest snapshot just restores the failure.

At that point, rollback to a last known good state seems like the only deterministic option.

I wrote down some thoughts on where autosave reaches its limit here: https://zippers.dev/blog/why-savior-safestate-recovery-exists

I’m not talking about crashes, errors, or failed requests.

I mean situations where data is lost quietly: - a user fills a long form, navigates away, and nothing is saved - a mobile browser suspends a tab and state disappears - a background sync never retries, but no error is reported

From the system’s point of view, everything “worked”. From the user’s point of view, their work is gone.

I’m curious: - Do teams actively try to detect this kind of silent data loss? - Or is it mostly accepted as unavoidable user behavior? - Are there metrics, patterns, or tools you’ve seen work for this?

Looking for real-world experiences, not theory.

I’m trying to understand how people handle changes to real system state. In many projects, once something writes to a DB or config, the previous state is effectively gone unless you planned for it upfront.

I haven’t personally dealt with large-scale failures here, but with more automation and AI writing state directly, it feels like reversibility matters more. Curious whether teams actively design for rollback, or mostly rely on backups and manual fixes.