As some of my replies to Jersey Mike's essays take weeks to compose, I always do those off-line. As for learning the British Broadcasting Corporation ode, I sometimes cheat by copy-pasting from the forum to the draft, though most of the odes are quite simple anyway.
Most of my problems of losing work disappeared when I realised that I could scroll down to the recent messages bit below the reply, select a bit of text there, and "quote" it straight into the reply.