How drafts auto-save and resume your launch

The bulk launch wizard saves your work as you go, so a refresh, an accidental tab close, or a quick detour to another ad account won't wipe out the creatives, targeting, and copy you've already set up. There's nothing to switch on — auto-save is always running in the background. This article explains exactly what's saved, where, and how to come back to it.

If you're new to the wizard itself, start with Understanding the bulk launch wizard steps.

How drafts are saved per ad account in your browser

Every time you change something in the wizard — selecting a creative, picking a campaign, typing primary text — uplads writes a draft to your browser's session storage. The draft is scoped to the ad account you're working in, using a separate key for each account (launch-wizard-draft:<your-account-id>). That means each ad account keeps its own independent draft; work in one never overwrites another.

The draft captures the full authoring state of your launch:

• Selected creatives (or existing ads for a relaunch, or a partnership post)
• Targeting: Page, Instagram account, campaign, and ad sets
• Ad copy, headlines, destination URL, CTA, and URL tags
• Carousel and multi-language (DLO) configuration
• Ad status (Paused / Active), naming-field values, schema overrides, and the resolved ad names you saw in Review
• The furthest step you've reached, so the wizard can re-enable the steps you've already unlocked

Because this lives in your browser's session storage, it's tied to that browser tab session — it is not synced to your account or visible on another device. Anyone signed into the same browser picks up the same draft.

Returning to the same step and content after a refresh

If you refresh the page (or navigate away within the same tab and come back), the wizard restores your draft automatically. While it loads the saved state you'll briefly see a spinner instead of step 1 — this is intentional, so the wizard never flashes the empty first step before jumping you back to where you were.

Two things are restored together:

1. Your content — every field listed above is repopulated.
2. Your step — the wizard reads the ?step= value in the URL and lands you there, but never past the furthest step you'd legitimately reached. So a refresh on the Review step returns you to Review with all your selections intact.

Browser Back and Forward also work between steps, since each step updates the ?step= slug in the address bar.

Switching ad accounts and returning to a previous draft

Because drafts are stored per ad account, switching accounts is safe. When you change the selected ad account, the wizard re-arms and loads that account's own draft (if one exists) — or starts clean if it doesn't. Your first account's draft stays untouched in the background.

Switch back to the original account later in the same session and the wizard restores that draft exactly as you left it: same step, same creatives, same copy. This makes it easy to juggle setups for several clients or brands without losing any of them.

For connecting and managing those accounts, see How to connect your Meta (Facebook & Instagram) account.

The unsaved-progress warning when closing the tab

Session storage survives refreshes and in-tab navigation, but it's cleared when the tab closes. To protect you there, uplads shows a browser confirmation dialog ("Leave site?") if you try to close the tab or fully reload while you have unsaved progress — for example, once you've selected creatives, chosen a campaign, or typed any ad copy.

A few notes:

• The warning only appears when there's real progress to lose. An empty wizard won't prompt you.
• It does not appear after a launch has already been queued or finished on the final step — at that point there's nothing left to protect.
• Modern browsers show their own generic message rather than custom text, so the wording you see comes from the browser, not uplads.

Why launchId is not persisted, and how to start fresh

One field is deliberately not restored from the draft: the launch's internal ID (launchId). Once you submit a launch, uplads assigns it an ID and freezes the wizard on the final step to track progress. If that ID were saved and reloaded later, a refresh hours or days afterward would strand you on the completion screen of an already-finished launch and report misleading "0 of 0" progress.

So every page load starts without an active launch ID. Your authoring content comes back; the in-flight launch session does not. To see the status of a launch you already submitted, use How to track launch progress and read results instead of refreshing the wizard.

When a launch completes and you want to build another, don't reload the page — use the Start another launch button on the success screen.

That button clears the saved draft, resets the wizard to step 1, and gives you a clean slate. As a convenience it keeps your Page and Instagram account selection (since one ad account almost always uses the same Page), so you can dive straight back into picking creatives.

Ready to run one end-to-end? See the Quickstart: launch your first ads with uplads, or get the bigger picture in What is uplads and how does it work?.