It’s harder than it used to be to accidentally lose all your work. Apps come with auto-save, and Chrome tries to warn you before you close a tab with unsaved work. But hit enter too fast, or suffer a crash, and you could still lose a lot of writing. It can happen to a Facebook update, an application form, or a blog post.
But the Chrome extension Typio Form Recovery can save what you write and paste it right back in.
Once you install Typio, you’ll see a little blue button in the corner of every web form. You’ll also see a green stripe on the top of the page, which glows every time Typio saves new text. Disable the stripe in the settings. To recover lost text, you can click the blue button, type the customisable keyboard shortcut, or find it in the right-click menu.
If any of those options gets annoying, you can turn off any or all of them. For instance, I only access Typio through a right-click. I got sick of the blue button, which shows up on every web form, including tweets, logins and searches. (By default, Typio doesn’t save passwords or credit card numbers, but you can change that.)
You can tell Typio how many days to save entries. When you open Typio, first it shows you a minimalist menu of your last few entries. Click “Browse all entries” to see a longer menu. All data is stored locally; nothing is sent to Typio. (You can check the source code.) And you can disable the extension on any site, like Twitter or Google.
This is especially useful if you write long entries on blogs, social media, or forms such as job applications. For instance, I just intentionally closed this blog post without saving, and brought it back in just a couple of clicks with Typio.
Typio replaces Lazarus, a similar extension (with a better name) that was eventually abandoned and kicked out of the Chrome Web Store. Even Lazarus had to die, but his spirit lives on.
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