Feature Request: Please provide an overwrite warning when pushing or pulling

Howdy,

I lost a day of work yesterday. I’m out of a job and under a lot of pressure building out a UX portfolio for myself. It was a horrible experience.

Here’s what happened:

I was working on a local site all day. When I finished for the day, instead of pushing my newer work to production I did a pull on accident. It overwrote my days work.

Here’s the feature request:

Please add a couple features to Local WP that checks which environment has the most recent work and or prevents this mistake from happening.

Acceptance criteria:

  • IF you are pulling prod to local (and prod is older than local) provide an alert to the user letting them know that if they continue with the pull they will overwrite the most recent work.
  • IF you are pushing local to prod (and prod is newer than local) provide an alert to the user letting them know that if they continue with the pull they will overwrite the most recent work.

Success KPIs:

  • Measure every time a user initiates a pull or push and risks an overwrite (showing the warning). This will tell you how often the potential risk happens.

Additional solutions:

  • Create a backup point before executing any push or pull requests
  • Provide an option for automated backups every 10m or so (duration set by user)

FYI - This happened because I had been working off of prod for a few days due to elementor background images not loading on devices locally using live link (iPad, Android, iPhone) even after a URL rewrite. I had been working off of prod so I could see background images while QA’ing on devices. I had been pulling to local after each day to keep a local copy. So when I started working locally again my regular behavior was to do a pull, instead of doing a push to prod. That is the “why” behind why my mistake happened to begin with. The background images not loading on devices locally is another bug I wish I could figure out a solution to.

Thanks!

Sean

2 Likes

Hi Sean,

This is super helpful feedback! Some of this functionality is available with MagicSync, but we’ve discussed the need for more robust notifications when working solo and also in a team setting.

When you push to Flywheel, we do take a backup (every 2 hours on production and every 8 hours on staging), and it’s an interesting thought to do this in the reverse!

Like with any application (or computer), we recommend backing-up you work regularly. In Local you can do this by right-clicking on a site and choosing Export. If you have something like Backblaze running this should also backup your site. We hear stories like yours often enough, so we’re exploring a cloud backup system for Local (on top of improving user prompts to suggest backups).

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Thanks for the quick response and the heads up on Backblaze. I just installed Backblaze FYI. :smiley:

I would love a chance to work with the Local team. Do you know of any open UX or Product Design roles? Are you guys a remote shop?

Thanks!

Sean

1 Like

Hi @seanharris sorry I missed this!

We don’t at this exact moment, but our team expands from time to time. Wanna send me your information at jack.sellwood@getflywheel.com?

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