Form drafts that survive a closed tab — and the 5 bugs everyone ships first

Short summary

React developers implementing form-draft persistence often hit five failure modes: empty initial state overwrites saved data, StrictMode double-mounts trigger unnecessary writes, React Hook Form's dynamic object references cause storage thrashing, localStorage access can throw and crash the form, and old-schema drafts corrupt new forms. The author provides code solutions unified by a single principle: compare serialized state to prevent wasteful writes and wrap all storage access in defensive try-catch blocks. Solutions are drawn from production code in the author's published npm package.

• •Five common failure modes: empty state overwrites, StrictMode double-mounts, React Hook Form thrashing, localStorage exceptions, and schema migration bugs
• •Solution: compare serialized state to skip unnecessary writes and wrap storage access in try-catch for graceful degradation
• •Based on production code from the author's published npm package

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