Do not use the branching beta on real work

I lost about 8hrs of work that never autosaved in a branch.

The Figma team should really make it clear this beta feature should not be used on anything of importance and is more just to play around and tinker with.

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Well isn’t that the point of beta, to tinker and test and not to production work in it without accepting risks ?

I’m sorry you lost the work !

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It’s worth calling out to others that you might encounter dataloss as a result of a bug in regards to a flagship feature some may take for granted, like autosave. Production work or not. Although it does seem others are using this beta on production work (being that the marketing surrounding this feature is highly suggestive of that, and this is a public-beta not an alpha feature). A explicit call out might be worth it on their end, thanks!

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Just experienced this myself, my file was stuck on “Checking for conflicts” and then all changes were lost after a reload :frowning:

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Oh no @Bryan_Berger, so sorry to hear about your experience. Thanks for calling it out. I’m gonna stay away from the branch feature from now on. I was about to use it for a critical component library that needed some maintenance, but that can surely wait. Better safe than sorry.

Thanks @Jenil_Gogari for tagging me on our slack channel. You just saved me from a world of pain.

Hey Davo!

Yeah, I figured there would be bugs, but not to this extent. It all worked out though. I ended up redoing the work and publishing the updates successfully thereafter.

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Hi there. I’m so sorry about the data loss!

Just to be clear, bugs of this magnitude are not expected in the beta. We’re treating this like a red alert internally and hope to get to the bottom of the situation ASAP.

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Hi - I’m R.J. from our engineering team here at Figma. I’m so sorry we lost your data here. Our team has investigated and identified an edge case in the branching feature that would disconnect Figma from saving updates. We have pushed a hot fix and are working on a more systemic fix going forward. To be sure you’re on the latest version of Figma, restart the Figma app or refresh your browser tab. Again, we take bugs like this very seriously, and thank you for reporting!

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Thank you for escalating this issue and getting to the bottom of it y’all.

Hello!

So after the loss of data, updating the Figma app, reloading the file, redoing the work, etc. I still can’t publish or merge the branch in to main file.

I start by clicking on “Review and Merge”

See this banner for updating the file from main

It says no changes available

But I still click on the “Apply Changes” and it apply something

The banner still won’t go away for “Updates are available”

I click on the “Merge” button

It opens the main file with the following error

The branched file is now showing this

I don’t get it, why is this a beta feature when it is pretty much not usable, please put it in alpha @Sho_Kuwamoto

Hi there. This is a specific edge case that can happen when a component has been removed from main, but still exists in the branch. A fix will be here soon.

Thanks,

Sho

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Also lost ~5 hours of work yesterday. Glad this problem is being addressed, but will not be using branching beta on real work going forward!

Same thing happened to me. I’m seeing that I’ve lost about 6 hours of work from Friday. The last autosave was Friday morning and apparently it reset to that autosave when it opened today.

I suppose I was a little too eager to use this feature. Definitely avoid using it until the autosaves are fixed at the least.

Hi Randy. Can our eng team contact you to learn more? The previous bug should already have been fixed, and we’d love to investigate your situation.

You can contact me at sho@figma.com

I also experienced the same issue and lost about an hour worth of work from yesterday to today.

Hi Aaron. Could you contact me so we can debug? Thanks! sho@figma.com

Hi there!

Our team has been investigating an issue where changes on a branch would sometimes not be saved properly, and we’re happy to let you know that we think we have found the root cause!

If you are currently working on a branch, you can open a fresh tab to make sure your changes have been saved. If they have not, you will need to redo that work in your fresh tab.
All new tabs should work properly.

If you experience any additional issues with unsaved changes, please let us know (and DM us the URL of the file), so that we can continue to investigate ASAP.

Thanks!

  • R.J.
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