History and getting a note back

Every note keeps its earlier versions, the trash holds what you deleted, and undo covers the rest.

Nothing you write is one mistake away from gone. Four different things can get a note back, or get it out of the way, and they're not the same thing. Here's which is which.

Earlier versions

History in a note's menu shows what the note said before, with a date and the name of whoever made the change. Open one to read it, and restore it if that version was better.

Restoring never destroys anything. The version you're leaving is written into the list first, so restoring the wrong one is itself undoable: open History again and come back.

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. A paragraph you pasted and then regretted gets its own entry straight away.

Each entry is the note as it was before that change, which is the version you'd actually want back.

A note keeps up to 200 versions. Past that the automatic ones are dropped oldest first, so entries you made deliberately outlive the ones that happened on their own.

The archive

Archiving isn't a recovery at all, and it's usually the one people actually want. An archived note isn't deleted, doesn't go to the trash, and keeps everything. It stops appearing in your lists, that's all. Archive in the rail is where it waits, and it comes back the same way.

Reach for it when a note is finished rather than wrong. Last year's plan, a project that shipped, the flat you didn't take. Deleting those loses them, and leaving them in the list makes everything else harder to find.

The trash

Deleting a note puts it in Trash in the rail. Restore puts it back where it was, in the folder it came from, with its history intact.

Nothing leaves the trash on its own. There's no thirty day clock: a note sits there until you empty it, and that's the moment it's actually gone.

A locked note is the exception. Emptying the trash leaves it where it is unless you've unlocked it in this browser.

Undo

⌘Z undoes the last thing you did, and it understands whole actions rather than characters. Delete ticked on a checklist comes back in one press rather than item by item, and so does a table row, a pasted block, or an indent.

Undo lives in the note you're looking at, and only while it's open. Once you've moved on, History is the thing to reach for.

Worth knowing

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.

Somebody else's changes are in the list. On a shared note each entry carries the name it was made under, so History is where you find out when a line changed, and who changed it.

Attachments come back with the version that had them. An image or a PDF you removed returns when you restore the version it was in. Once no note and no remaining version points at a file, whether because you emptied the trash or because the version holding it aged out of the 200, the file itself is tidied away.

Good habits

Before a big rewrite, take a version on purpose. It costs a second, it survives the 200 version pruning longer than an automatic one, and it gives you a deliberate point to come back to instead of hunting through timestamps.

Empty the trash deliberately, not reflexively. It's the only step on this page that can't be undone, and an accidentally deleted note is exactly what it exists to protect against.

Export now and then if it matters. History and the trash live in your account. Settings → Your data → Download everything gives you a copy that doesn't, and that's the copy that survives a forgotten password or a mistake nobody noticed for a month.

Last updated 21 September 2026