Here's a thing that happens.

You have a note with the plan for the Lisbon trip: flights, the flat, a list of restaurants a friend sent. One evening you tidy it up. You cut a section that seems out of date and paste something else in its place.

Two weeks later you want the name of that restaurant near the river. It was in the section you cut.

In most apps, that's the end of it. Undo only reaches back as far as the note has been open, and the note has been closed for two weeks.

In Scratchpad, you open History in the note's menu.

What History Shows

History lists what the note said before. Each entry has a date and the name of whoever made the change.

Open one to read it. Tick two and Compare shows what changed between them. If an older version is the one you want, restore it.

Restoring never destroys anything. Before the old version comes back, the version you're leaving is written into the list. So restoring the wrong one is itself undoable: open History again and go back.

The restaurant is in there, in the version from before the evening you tidied up.

When a Version Is Taken

Not on every keystroke, or the list would be useless.

One is kept when ninety seconds have passed since the last, or when the change is large, about 180 characters, whichever comes first. So a burst of typing becomes one entry, and a paragraph you pasted and then regretted gets its own entry straight away.

Each entry is the note as it was before that change.

That sounds like a detail. It's really the whole point.

The version you want back is almost never the one you just made. It's the one you had before you made it.

How Long It Lasts

A note keeps up to 200 versions. Past that, the automatic ones are dropped oldest first.

You can also take one on purpose. Save a version now in History marks the note as it stands, and a version you saved yourself outlives the automatic ones when the pruning starts.

Before a big rewrite of the kitchen renovation budget, that costs one click. It gives you a point to come back to that you don't have to hunt for by timestamp.

Now the honest limit. History is long, not infinite.

A note you edit heavily every day for months will eventually lose its oldest automatic versions. For anything you want to keep forever, Download everything in Settings, under Your data, gives you a copy that lives outside your account.

What Comes Back With a Version

All of it.

• Files: an image or a PDF you removed from the note returns when you restore the version that had it. Files are only tidied away once no note and no remaining version points at them.
• Locked notes: a locked note keeps its history too, sealed the same way the note is. The list is readable once you've unlocked it, and never before.
• Names: on a shared note, each entry carries the name it was made under. So History is also where you find out when a line changed, and who changed it.

That last one earns its keep in a note two people share for a renovation, where "who moved the deadline?" is a fair question. History gives it a plain answer.

The Other Ways Back

History is one of four, and they're not the same thing.

The Trash deserves a second look. Nothing leaves it on its own. There's no thirty day clock, so a note stays there until you empty it.

The full guide is in History and getting a note back.

Why It Works This Way

A notes app asks you to trust it with things you didn't write anywhere else.

The least it can do is make sure nothing you typed is one mistake away from gone. Including the mistake of tidying up.

Most of the time you'll never open History. It's there for the evening you need it.

And that evening is rarely one you saw coming.