The Drafts That Vanished on Monday Morning
When I opened the Windows device, all three card-news drafts had turned into the same content. The cause was simple. The bot that writes copy and the bot that adjusts layout both saved into the same folder under the name 「final」, and whoever saved second quietly overwrote the earlier file.
No error message appeared. Overwriting is silent by nature.
Recovery Took Longer Than Expected
The old routine went like this: scroll back through Slack to copy the wording, dig through git history for an older version, and ask a bot to rewrite whatever was missing. Bringing back three drafts took about 40 minutes that day.
The Fix Was One Line
Before saving, copy the existing file into a backup folder under a timestamped name. I put this rule at the very top of both bots' instruction sheets.
Save rule: if a file with the same name exists,
copy it to backup/filename_datetime first, then save.
Results After Two Weeks
• Overwrite incidents: 2 per week → 0 (even when files collide, a copy remains)
• Recovery time: about 40 minutes → about 3 minutes (pull from backup and paste)
• On days when the Mac mini bot touched the same folder, checking the original became easier too
What I Learned
Telling a bot to 「save carefully」 is weaker than building a structure that does not need care. For a small team, a rule that lets you undo a mistake within 3 minutes fits better than a rule that tries to prevent every mistake. One backup copy barely takes any disk space.