Note Revision History

I would love if we could maintain a revision history for notes - right now, I have to dual-wield subscriptions (Bear + Drafts) in order to maintain proper revision history for my notes (at risk of switching out of a window in bear and losing some edit history before realising). I’d love to have piece of mind of maintaining version history in here too :slight_smile:

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Right now the focus is on Bear Web and Panda. After that, revision history is high on the list of things we would like to do.

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Glad to hear, thank you!

Does “revision history of notes” means an automatic back up of the whole database OR saving manually different versions of a note?

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The latter I would guess. What would you find useful?

I personally would like to see a version saved every time I make a change to any note, for the last 30 days.

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I agree. You usually want note versions when something went wrong, and that means not having to manually establish them.

Yeah that’s sort of what I’m envisioning. For example, in drafts (where I have it currently) I can see and restore versions over time:

This is one of the few remaining reasons I keep drafts around

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Actually i would consider both functions useful. But if i have to decide i would choose the latter one. The first one is more like a general backup. The second one - the version control - serves a different purpose but also can be considered as a kind of backup. Maybe both functions can be combined: The notes are all backuped by a special time rhythm (like in ulysses) and additionally to that i can store single notes manually. It would be then important for me to be able to find easily those manualy stored versions. A deluxe feature would be to be able to work with all those manually stored versions: I am thinking of having different drafts of the same note. I hope you understand what i mean with “other purpose than backup”

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In this thread automatic backups were discussed. Note version control by manually saving versions is indeed a different task. I took a look into drafts and it works different than what I have in my mind. I would be interested to hear how and for what purpose you use a version history like in drafts.

In drafts you can restore once saved versions but with two main differences to what I imagined as version control: 1. After restoring a version it remains with its old content as preset for a future restoration. I rather thought that by continuing working on that version the content of that version changes automatically by adaption to what you have added to the note. And 2. after restoring a version you loose the content of the note before restoration.

When we talk about version control we seam to mean two different tasks:

  1. Actually there is just one note that keeps different versions as a backup for replacing the current note (like in draft)

  2. You have real versions and each version changes with the process of working with that version

Would be interested to hear what would be more preferable :smiley:

I think revision history should be a higher priority, considering how Bear actually has data loss problems. Just last week, I found a note with a missing image:

I reported this particular bug in April 2023: [BUG] Missing images upon sync?

See also this thread: Images missing in imported notes

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I really like how Simplenote handles history. I think it keeps a full history of the note, and I can easily pull the slider back to the date and time while seeing what it looks like in real time. I was so used to it that I was surprised to find that Bear doesn’t have anything similar.

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I just wanted to add how critical this feature is! I actually thought it was part of Bear 2! but “History Navigation” just navigates what notes you’ve visited! I"m just so glad that I haven’t lost any important information yet!

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Why should you loose any important information?

By accidentally deleting it, then not realising before the undo history is cleared.

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It’s quite plausible that you edit a note, make some changes, navigate away from the note, and then realise the changes you made are incorrect/you made it to the wrong area/etc. Or, accidentally delete a header that was folded, navigate away, realise you had that header folded with more in it that you intended to delete. There are multiple scenarios where this can occur.

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I use a multi-monitor setup. While preparing a coding lesson, I thought I had the focus on VS Code. I pressed ⌘+A followed by Delete to remove the content of a file, but nothing happened. So, I moved the cursor to the file in VS Code and repeated the command. This time, it worked fine.

However, the focus had previously been on a long Bear note that was open in its own window on another screen, and I inadvertently deleted all its content. When I returned to Bear, I closed all open windows to search for the long note, only to realize what had happened. Even if I had a backup of the Bear database from the previous day, I lost all the work I had done that morning.

I was distracted and lost in thought, I know :face_with_head_bandage: By the way, a revision history feature (even limited to the last 5 or 10 actions) would have saved me.

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Also consider how Word implements version history when saved in OneDrive.

+1, this is very needed

Yeah. I had 2 instances in the past 3 days where this was needed.