Why have I lost changes to my project?

The Kapwing video editor saves your progress every few minutes while you are editing but requires a working internet connection to do this.

When you are editing a project, you can imagine that a tunnel from your computer is connected to our servers, where data continuously flows to our servers, like trains. However, browsers try to limit unnecessary power and CPU usage, so they may close that tunnel without notifying you or us, meaning you may make changes but the data is no longer sent, because the tunnel is closed.

If you see an old version of your project when you reopen it, it might be because a loss of network connection prevented Kapwing from saving your changes. Typically this work is not recoverable.

You can check when your project was last saved by clicking the "Last edited..." text to the left of the "Settings" button. In this menu, you can also access your project's Version History which will list all of the versions of your project that we have saved on our servers.

What if I need to work on my project for a long time?

If you do ever need to work on a project for a long time period, we often recommend returning to your Workspace every 45-60 minutes and taking a short break. You can refresh upon returning.

Why? Traditionally, websites would send and receive information based on a user's action - if you click on a link, the website loads with new information. Today, many online applications like Kapwing use web sockets to continuously send information. You can imagine this like a tunnel opens between your browser and our server, where information is constantly being sent to us about what you're doing, so we can save your project continuously.

We suspect there may be a time period after which browsers are now shutting off this web socket because it's been open for longer than deemed necessary or sent more data than usual. We're still working on identifying if and when that happens, so we can notify you and prevent further changes until you can reopen that connection. But for now, our best guess is that this occurs around 45-60 minutes into an editing session, so by walking away and later refreshing, you're reopening the connection, and giving your browser a break from streaming data.