Changing Page to Redirect or Grouping Page removes content a

This is an old issue I have with Sitefinity and it has to do with enabling/disabling the "This page redirects to another page" feature. 

Requirement: 
An editor has a page on their website that is no longer in use, but it's important for this page to be redirected to alternative content for SEO purposes. 

Solution:
Enable the option "This page redirects to another page" option for this page. 

Issues:
It seems the revision history is purely for content on the page and doesn't include anything to do with the page properties. 

We've had this on so many occasions and it is painful to try and explain this to our customers, but the most recent one is where a customer changed the page to "This page redirects to another page" and didn't realise that this would trash the page. 

Here's the major problems: 

1. It completely removes ALL your content and any themes 
2. It does this with ZERO warning to the user
3. And it does all of this without the ability to recover it. 

It would make far more sense if: 

1. You warned the user that you will lose all the content of the page
2. You provide another alternative to 301 redirecting pages without removing content
3. You made these types of changes part of the revision history

The only alternative solution I can think of is to move the page in question to an unpublished grouping page called say "Unused", then change it's URL to make sure it can't be found directly. Then create a dummy page in the same location as where the page originally existed, make sure it's URL matches the old URL then change it to be a redirecting page. In this way you retain the content of the previous page whilst still getting the redirect that you were looking for. 

Seems like there should be a better way to handle this. 

Hello Jacques,

There is Feature requests for that behaviour, that you vote for:
- http://feedback.telerik.com/Project/153/Feedback/Details/126987-save-page-data-if-the-page-is-convert-to-group-redirect-page
- http://feedback.telerik.com/Project/153/Feedback/Details/126525-ability-to-restore-page-content-when-switching-a-standard-page-to-redirect-and-th

The solution that I could propose you is to use JavaScript or Code behind redirects instead.

Regards,
Svetoslav Manchev
Telerik

Thanks Svetoslav. 

I noticed that both these are actually duplicate feature requests. Does your feature request system allow for merging of items as well as their 'following' and 'likes/dislikes' data? 

Hello Jacques,

Thank you for your feedback. You are correct they are actually two sides of the same coin.

I have removed the first one and kept the one with the higher number of votes:
http://feedback.telerik.com/Project/153/Feedback/Details/126525-ability-to-restore-page-content-when-switching-a-standard-page-to-redirect-and-th

Regards,
Svetoslav Manchev
Telerik by Progress