I lost a workflow after I thought I saved, it said I saved so I closed n8n and when I came back all my progress was deleted

Questions
1

Describe the problem/error/question

What is the error message (if any)?

Please share your workflow

(Select the nodes on your canvas and use the keyboard shortcuts CMD+C/CTRL+C and CMD+V/CTRL+V to copy and paste the workflow.)

Share the output returned by the last node

Information on your n8n setup

  • n8n version:
  • Database (default: SQLite):
  • n8n EXECUTIONS_PROCESS setting (default: own, main):
  • Running n8n via (Docker, npm, n8n cloud, desktop app):
  • Operating system:
  • I thought I had saved my workflow with a lot of progress it said saved at the top so I thought it was good but when I came back everything was gonee except for a little bit when I first started
2

Hi @Damian_Sedillo Welcome!
Verify the “Executions” list of your workflow. If you ran the workflow, you can recover the latest version from there by copying its data and pasting it into the editor. Now in the latest version of n8n they have autosave so this would not happen again! Hope this helps.

3

Hi @Damian_Sedillo

Welcome to the n8n community!

sorry that happened, losing work like that is really frustrating.
One important thing to be aware of is that seeing “Saved” in the UI only means the frontend sent the save request; if there’s a brief connection issue, restart, or storage persistence problem, the workflow may not actually be written to the database. That’s why executions can sometimes be the only recovery point.
As a prevention tip, it’s a good idea to make sure your n8n data volume/database is properly persisted and to occasionally export important workflows, especially while actively building them. Newer versions with autosave help a lot, but reliable storage is still key.

Hope this helps clarify what happened.