Imagine this: You just got out of the writer’s block and spent the whole day writing the first draft of the next chapter of your book. You feel good about the progress but now is time to get some coffee. So, you submit the draft to your editor, step away from your screen, pour yourself some caffeinated goodness, and finally feel recharged enough to get back to writing.
However, when you log back in and open the window, all you see is a blank Notion page. Your editor does not know what went wrong.
They started editing, added a few comments,, a few CMD +Zs here, and a few Oxford commas there, before they closed the tab by mistake. And they, somehow, can’t bring the draft back.
It might feel like the end of the world if you did not know that Notion stores all versions of your page and you can restore any of those easily, in just a few clicks! So, catch a breath because your content is safe and waiting for you to retrieve it. Let’s see how.
Here are the three steps to check Notion page history and restore a version:
1. Open the pertinent Notion page
Let's take the example of a Notion budget tracker page. We will use it for reference and demonstrate how to access and restore on older version.
Here's what the database looks like:
2. Click on the “...” icon at the top-right corner of your page and then on “Page History”
The “...” icon unfurls all the settings that you can customize specifically for the page. Locate it at the top-right corner of your screen and click on it.
Next, click on the “Page history” option to access the screen that displays all the previous versions of the page.
3. Select the version that you want to restore and click on the “Restore” button
For demonstration purposes, we will restore the version containing only the master view of the tracker, excluding the other views.
As demonstrated in the image below, an older version contains that view.
What we'll do next is click on that version’s timestamp and then on the restore button.
The image below displays the older version restored as the current version of the page.
What is the time difference between two versions of Notion page history?
The time difference between two versions of a Notion page is ten minutes when the page is active on a user's screen. However, if the user navigates away from the screen, and spends time on another page or another tool for two minutes straight, it counts as the end of the session and Notion records the snapshot as another version.
Let's go back to the example of the book writer and evaluate what happened.
While the editor was adding the comments, they might have deleted the content by mistake before closing the tab. This page stayed empty for more than two minutes, so Notion retained the blank screen as the live page and the deleted draft as another version.
However, the writer can now simply access the version history, as demonstrated in the previous section, to retrieve and restore any of the previous snapshots.
How old can a page version be before it becomes inaccessible?
While Notion stores all page versions indefinitely, you can access all page versions up to 7 days old if you are on the “Free” plan.
To access older versions, you need to upgrade to either the “Plus” plan that lets you access versions up to 30 days old, or the “Business” plan which gives you access to versions that are as much as 90 days old.
To access versions that are even older, you need to subscribe to the “Enterprise” plan.
Gone are the days when you would lose all content in your document if you abruptly lost power. Most modern tools allow you to save a copy of different versions of your document on cloud and Notion is not different.
Next time, when a team member accidentally edits content or deletes it altogether, do not panic, simply look up the version history of the Notion page and roll it back to the previous version.
