Version history
How knowdust keeps every version of every note, and how to browse, preview, and restore any earlier save.
Version history is the reason knowdust exists. Every save — and saves happen automatically as you write — is kept as a version: a complete snapshot of the note at that moment. Delete a paragraph today, and the version from yesterday still has it.
You never manage this. It just accumulates, quietly, while you write.
Browsing your history
Click History in the top right (or its layer icon). The history rail opens beside the note, showing versions as stacked layers — the newest on top in brass, older ones fading down, like sediment. Each layer shows when it was saved.
Click a layer and the editor shows the note exactly as it was then. This is a preview — read it, scroll it, compare it in split view; nothing changes until you say so. Press Esc or cancel the preview to come back to the present.
Restoring — and why it's safe
Found the version you want? Click Restore this version.
Here is the important part: restoring never destroys anything. It doesn't rewind history or delete the versions after that point. It takes the old content and saves it as a new version on top. Your history afterwards reads: …older versions, the version you restored from, everything written since, and now a new version with the restored text.
So you can restore freely. Restored the wrong version? Open the rail and restore the one before it. In knowdust there is no destructive action anywhere in this loop.
What makes a version
A version is kept when you pause typing (about a second and a half) and the note has changed, or when you press Ctrl/Cmd + S. One version per pause — not one per keystroke — so a writing session leaves a readable trail, not thousands of entries.
How far back you can go
- Free — browse and restore versions from the last 7 days.
- Plus — your whole history, back to the first save, forever.
On the free plan, versions older than 7 days become unavailable to browse or restore — but they are not deleted. Upgrade to Plus and your full history is there, including the versions from your free months. See Plans and billing for the whole picture.
Under the hood (for the curious)
Every note is a plain markdown file, and its versions are kept with Git — the same version-control system that safeguards most of the world's software — running invisibly on knowdust's servers. You never see Git and never need to know it exists. But it's why exporting gives you real files, and why "kept forever" is an engineering fact rather than a slogan.
Something on this page wrong or unclear? Tell us — it'll be fixed.