[Pro feature] Revision history

(Moved from Trello; you can vote for this feature and see past discussion at https://trello.com/c/xvCCc9wv/114-possibly-pro-revision-history)

Each document will have a series of version (or “revisions”) that you can go back to at any time. Similar to how Google Docs does it.

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Somewhat helpful – would tag it as a Pro feature.

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Would make collaboration more comfortable

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I would love to see this feature implemented. What would be really cool (but not absolutely necessary) is if it were git-based: easy export by simply cloning the “repo”, committing snapshots in time along with comments, github backups, diffs showing exactly which points/notes/bullets have changed, etc.

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Our versioning system is pretty similar to git, in the sense that we do “rebase” as well. But unfortunately I don’t think we’ll change our versioning system to use git.

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Thanks for your feedback. Keep up the great work!!

What about storing just 1 or 2 versions for the free plan to avoid disaster (select all + Delete combo)?

Kind of feel it’s a replication of the automated backup. So, for me, nice to have but not a priority.

Love to have my changes emailed to me though, as can happen with Workflowy. This way it’s also easy to find a change back

I think two big use cases that are covered by revision history but not email to self or automated backups are:
(1) Some people want to revert back to a state with one-click, rather than looking and comparing himself.
(2) It’s exponentially to recover data for very frequently edited documents that change a ton during a day (e.g. a team document that gets edited by 10s of people).

Revision history is the in-app way to recover, while automated backups give more peace of mind that if Dynalist somehow goes down or dies or production data is erased (I surely hope those don’t happen but it has happened to Amazon recently so who knows), you still own your data in plain text and OPML format.

Erica why don’t you lump this in with the split screen feature? Split screen - #25 by Morgan_Newall

And then for users to check back to another state, have it similar to a git / diff-checker. UI would look similar to this https://www.diffchecker.com/

Or at least the left screen shows newer notes, right side older notes, and changes made

also I really like this idea too. The problem with a git style commit though is people won’t remember to do this.

They are pretty different in nature, and split screen would be a lot harder to implement than revision history, so it wouldn’t make sense for revision history to depend on split screen. And people coming from other apps would have expectations about how the revision history feature would work, so we’ll most likely stick to that.

Since this is currently in progress, I would love to comment on my support for this, as it is extremely useful for publicly accessible documents and collaboration projects. In case something is messed up or someone with malicious intent deletes everything, it’s good to have a backup and see what subtle changes have been made. Thanks in advance for this feature.

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How do you guys currently envision the revision history feature to look like?

Pretty much like Google Docs. The difference is that we might have a before/after view, instead of one view with both additions and deletions.

How would the user be able to pick up on subtle changes? Would they by highlighted?

Red for deletions (in the “before” view) and green for additions (in the “after” view).

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Hi, any update, this function is really helpful for doc management.