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Say I am writing an answer and it is successfully saved as a draft. Then the OP deletes the question before I post my draft. What happens then? Is my draft available anywhere? Will I see it if I am a 10K user that can see the deleted question? Will the draft show again if the question is undeleted?

The draft specs do not mention deleted questions, so it is a blur area to me.

This comes from the question Los borradores de respuestas, ¿se pierden si OP elimina la pregunta? in Meta Spanish.SE, where a 10K user cannot see their draft anymore.

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    You will not see it, not even as a 10K user, while deleted because deleted questions don't have answer boxes that can show drafts. I'm not sure if it will reappear upon undeletion :)
    – Tinkeringbell Mod
    Commented Aug 31, 2020 at 13:05

2 Answers 2

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You should still see the draft if a question goes through a delete / undelete cycle, but that's more of an artifact of how drafts currently work than a deliberate feature, so I'm not sure it will always remain that way.

I'm also not 100% certain how often orphan drafts are culled, so if you were almost done writing an epic answer to something and notice its existence come into question, maybe save it safely in a text file somewhere if it could be useful in the future.

tl;dr: Yes, it should work, but in six to eight arbitrary units of time it might not.

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  • If the OP deletes their own question, this looks different from other types of deletion. Is there still a draft somewhere in that case?
    – aschepler
    Commented Apr 6, 2021 at 20:22
  • @aschepler Yes. That's exactly the case described in the question. It would also work if, say, a moderator deleted the question (with the same disclaimer: it's not promised behavior, so the behavior could be subject to change).
    – user50049
    Commented Apr 7, 2021 at 17:24
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I think it will. I recently wrote a draft on a question about Bricks SE, the OP accidentally deleted (and undeleted) their question twice, and my answer draft came back - but only if the "Draft Saved" message appeared:

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