You haven’t lived on the internet till you have written a long comment on a subject you fee strongly about, only to hit submit and lose it. Or it was a carefully crafted job application.

Perhaps the site threw an error, perhaps the site is down, or your internet connection. Or the page is simply too old, and a WordPress server somewhere asks you if you are sure you want to do that, without providing a way to say “yes” and do it [hint…]

Luckily, there is a way to recover the data as long as you haven’t browsed away from the page that went wrong. If you are using a Chrome browser, right click somewhere in the page and select “inspect Element”. This will split the screen so that the lower half shows technical information related with the page.

Click on the tab “network”. You will find the form data there. You may need to reload the page so that the data can be captured with the request. Go to the Form part and expand it (click on it) and there, your precious work of art will be.

How to recover submitted form data in Chrome

Copy the data somewhere set and you are all done.