Critical Bug - Retool not saving changes

We've been running into some issues with Migrations, our engineers are actively working on finding the root cause in order to fix this.

Please let us know if this allows you recover your progress and/or make new changes.

Hi,

I've been seeing some issues relating to history vs saved changes in apps and in workflows also (Retool cloud version, running in Chrome on a Mac).

Steps to reproduce in app...

  • Change a javascript query and save it - the changes appears in the history.
  • Restart machine, reopen Chrome and inspect the edited query - changes are not present in the query despite appearing in the history (it actually looks like the last deployed version is shown).
  • Refresh the page - the changes reappear in the query

Not quite sure how I got similar in a workflow the other day but it was a similar pattern whereby the code in a workflow would revert to another version until I refreshed the page in the browser.

1 Like

Thank you for sharing your experience, we added it to the internal report.

Hi Retool team,

I need your help with a serious issue that's becoming more frequent in our Retool app. I just lost 2.5 hours of work, and it's quite frustrating.

Here's what's happening: Even after saving my changes, if I reload the page or step away from Retool and come back, I'm losing all my work. This includes everything - scripts I've written, component values, and any settings I've changed.

This is really disrupting our development work, and I'd really appreciate if you could look into this ASAP. It seems to be happening more often lately, and I want to make sure we don't lose any more work.

The only way I've found in the past to prevent it is by saving a version every time I want to leave the app but most of the time when I'm losing the saved work it's because I wanted to quickly go out of retool to check a previous link or close some tabs in my browser.

Could you help investigate why our saves aren't sticking?

3 Likes

In short, whatever change we apply to a certain app is lost the next day.
All the edits are stored in the 'History' of the app, but for some reason they are not persistent.
We'll need support here recovering the latest state of apps, otherwise all the time spent developing them is just wasted.

3 Likes

Experienced the same bug today. There was some strange "run migrations" at the time I wasn't making any changes at all. And today I lost all the changes I made yesterday.

Cured it by reverting to the state at 4:08 pm.
image

2 Likes

Thank you for flagging this. Our team is investigating now!

3 Likes

Thank you all for your patience as we continue investigating the root cause of this issue.

Are any of the affected apps using Modules?

2 Likes

I have not experienced this issue since I originally reported it. What I've done differently is:

  • Never edit in retool with more than one retool tab open
  • Never edit an app while a retool "play" window is open

I export the project every single time I finish some work worth saving, without fail, just in case. I also close every single retool window before I start editing an app.

I hope this helps other users facing this issue, and hope a solid fix is introduced soon!

3 Likes

Hi @Paulo , wrote you a DM, has this bug today morning. And I'm not using Modules.

I'll leave my app as it is right now, so you can see that the current state of the app != last state I left it after making changes at Dec, 12.

There was this strange "run migration" at 5:42AM Dec, 13. And yesterday I didn't opened Retoll at all.

In addition to @Joseph_Cileo , I do edit my app within several tabs on different laptops (like home and at work). And I never close Retool tabs. Just refreshing them on the next day. May this be an issue?

1 Like

I was doing the same, and that was when I experienced the save issue. I'd suggest you to only ever use one retool tab at any time and see if your saves persist. I know it's annoying, but unfortunately until this is addressed it seems like the only surefire way to not lose work.

2 Likes

@Batik - This is 100% the issue I also experience.

If you leave an app open in editor mode and step away for an extended period of time, then come back to it, the issue becomes reproducible. I know this might be easier said than done, but it happens pretty consistently for me.

For context, I use an app called Wavebox, which is essentially a Chrome wrapper. I have Retool set up as one of the apps within Wavebox, so it's always open in the background for me. I suspect this is why I encounter the problem more frequently.

If I don’t perform a hard refresh before making changes, I end up editing an older version of the app.

4 Likes

Same problem here, leaving editor open results in lost work now; this did not happen until recently

I’ve been doing some extensive editing over the past week and have experienced this at least a half dozen times. It’s really frustrating when you don’t realize and you start working just to realize you’re missing updates you’ve already completed. I just end up redoing the work since restoring will wipe out the most resent changes. Maybe Retool can give us access to source control until this issue is resolved.

1 Like

Now I'm seeing this problem even after working continually without stopping. In particular all my Row Action event handlers in a table will just disappear.

This seems the 'save' call is taking really very very long to complete.
I have been observing the Chrome network ; and 'save' can take 30 seconds

  • Hosted
  • v3.139.0

Thank you all for continuing to share your experience with us. We've surfaced all your feedback internally and our engineers are actively working on this.

We've made progress and will provide an update on this issue as soon as possible.

Until we have a fix, @Joseph_Cileo's workflow should prevent us from losing changes:

Thank you for your patience.

Hello — I've seen similar erasing/overwriting behavior happen to released changes as well. Example:

  1. A colleague leaves the editor open in a tab on their laptop; the last version they opened was version 1.0.0
  2. I make some changes in a tab on my laptop, and save and release them as version 1.0.1.
  3. My colleague returns to their laptop and makes some changes. They save and release their work as version 1.0.2. The base of this version's diff is 1.0.0, not 1.0.1, so all the changes from 1.0.1 are deleted in 1.0.2.

Hi @ch_dc, welcome to the forum! :wave:

This is expected behavior. The only way for two or more users to work on the same app simultaneously is by using Multiplayer.

Here is an excellent article from @JoeyKarczewski and @sophie on how to best use Retool's Release Manager to work together inside of Retool:

Besides small UI changes, the only thing that has changed since the article was published is that we now have Multiplayer available for all Cloud instances.

If you are looking to work collaboratively on Retool with a similar workflow as we can with git, this is only possible with Source Control, which is a feature included in our Enterprise plan.

Hi @Paulo,

So, I've experienced this every day now. You can see today's changes:

When I reopened the app this morning, I saw many changes undone, and in the history I can see this modified plugins. It is not connected only to migrations, not it seems to be randomly applying changes.