The count on the tab and the projects under it are measured differently, which is why they can disagree. The number in brackets counts everything you have. The tab itself only filters the projects already loaded onto the page. Your drafts are safe, and nothing has been deleted. They are further down a list that has not been fetched yet.
The fix is to load the whole list before you use the tabs.
Load the list first, then filter
- Stay on the All tab.
- Scroll to the bottom and select Load More Projects. Your projects arrive 12 at a time, most recently edited first.
- The line under the button reads "Showing X of Y projects". Keep pressing until X reaches Y.
- Now switch to Published or Drafts. The tab has the full list to work with and will agree with its count.
An old draft you have not touched in a long time sits near the bottom, because the list is ordered by when each project was last edited.
Why "No draft projects" can be wrong
If none of the loaded projects happen to be drafts, the Drafts tab shows "No draft projects. All your projects are published" even when the count beside it says otherwise. Read the count, not the message.
The tabs disappear when a tab comes up empty
When a tab has nothing to show, the tab row and the Load More button are both hidden, so there is no visible way back to All. Reload the page. It returns to the All tab with everything intact, and you can then load the rest of the list as above.
What each count actually counts
The two counts are drawn from separate lists, and they use one clear rule:
- Published counts every project that has been published at least once, and it stays there afterwards. Unpublishing a version, or leaving unpublished edits on it, does not move a project into Drafts.
- Drafts counts projects that have never been published.
- All counts every project you are a team member on, whether you created it or were invited to it.
So a published project that you are part way through editing is a published project, not a draft. Its unsaved changes live in the builder. See Can I edit my project or publication after publishing?.
Journals and Publications behave the same way
The Journals and Publications sections of your profile are built the same way: server counts on the tabs, client-side filtering over what has been loaded. Load the full list before trusting an empty tab there too. See Finding your journal drafts and Finding your publication drafts.
If a draft is genuinely gone
If the Drafts count itself is lower than you expect, the project has been removed rather than hidden. See Recovering a deleted project.