The recovery shelf
“Your session expired.”
What about your draft?
You finish an application, press Continue, and land on a sign-in page. Before you start over, check whether any copy of your writing survived.
Still see the text? Copy it first.
If the original form is still open and readable, save the text in a private local document before refreshing, signing in or navigating away. A timeout doesn't always clear the page immediately.
When the form is already empty
Check the original page
If the sign-in prompt opened in a new tab or window, the original form may still be there. Preserve any visible text before doing anything that reloads it.
Look for a site draft
After signing in through the site's normal flow, check for saved applications, unsent messages or drafts. Some websites keep them separately from the page that expired; others don't.
Check your existing form saver
If Lifeboat was installed and saving before the timeout, return to the form and open its popup. Look for the saved text and earlier versions. A matching empty field may also trigger the rescue card.
Restore or copy the saved words
Use Restore if the original field is available. If the sign-in redirect changed the page or field, use Copy from the saved draft and paste it into the new form. Check the pasted text before submitting.
What a recovery extension cannot do
Lifeboat cannot reopen your site's login session, submit the form for you, or recover words it never saved. Installing it after the timeout cannot reach back into the old form.
It also does not back up uploaded documents, selected files, checkboxes or the whole application. Keep the original attachments and use the website's own draft-saving feature when one is available.
Why a Lifeboat draft might be missing
Free saving starts once a field reaches 25 characters. Lifeboat keeps up to three versions for seven days, so very short or expired drafts may not be there. A sudden page change can happen before the latest edits finish saving.
A site may have been paused, Chrome may not have granted the required site access, or the editor may not be supported. Password fields and fields identified as payment or national-ID inputs are excluded. If an older saved version exists, it may still spare you part of the rewrite.
If you changed pages during sign-in, use the popup to browse available saved drafts rather than relying only on an automatic rescue card.
Make the next timeout less costly
For a long application, save a local draft of your answers as you go. Install Lifeboat before you start writing if you also want automatic copies of eligible website text fields.
Use the manual sample check in the current version. Test Lifeboat, coming in v1.0.2, will add a sample test inside the extension. Use harmless sample text to check any custom editor that matters to you; keep real applications out of the test.
Core rescue is free and requires no account. Saved drafts stay encrypted on this device; there is no draft cloud or telemetry. You can pause saving on a site. Draft deletion is coming in v1.0.2. See the saving and privacy controls →
Browser closed instead of logging you out? Read how to recover text after a Chrome crash.
Try the sample rescue simulation →