Introduction
Two “forgettable” but very important features we’ll talk about in this lesson are Edit History & Trash. A lot of Notion users don’t really understand how they work, and that can lead to some frustrations – let’s dive in!
Copy link to headingVersion history
Version (or edit) history is a very useful feature that lets us restore a previous version of any Notion page in our workspace. Ever accidentally deleted a carefully built database view? Edit History is here to help.
You can find version history in the top-right three-dot menu available on any page. You need to scroll down a bit to find it – once you click it, a full screen pop up will open.
This pop up shows a preview of your old page version on the left, and on the right a timeline of all snapshots made of a page. Using the timeline, you can circle back through all the saved versions and then click “Restore” if you’d like to restore a previously saved version.
Keep in mind that restoring will overwrite all current content on a page with that previously saved version. So, if you’d like to restore but also keep what you currently have on the page, you’ll need to manually copy that existing content to a separate page, restore, and then merge all content manually.
We can’t currently restore only parts of an older version – only the entire page, as it was saved at the time.
Versions are only saved to version history some time after edits are made. Which means that you won’t see 50 versions saved from a longer editing session where you added a lot of content – for quick changes while having a page open, it’s best to use the traditional Undo and Redo features. Version history is meant to let us go back in a larger amount of time.
Copy link to headingTrash
Another key feature is the Trash. Whenever you delete a page (either from the top-right three-dot menu when you have the page open), or by right clicking on it either on the Sidebar or when its a block, it will first go into the Trash.
You can find the Trash at the bottom of the left sidebar (scroll down if you can’t see it immediately). Once you open it, you’ll see all recently deleted pages. You can either restore them, by clicking the little arrow, or delete them permanently, by clicking the trash icon next to their title. Restoring a page will “return” it to its original location with all its contents.
Deleting a page permanently will fully delete it from Notion’s servers. After a page is fully deleted, there are few chances of restoring it – in some cases, Notion support can restore that page within a few days of deletion, but if some time passes, it will be fully deleted from the entire system, and thus not recoverable.
By default, pages are stored in Trash for 30 days before being permanently deleted.
Copy link to headingPlan limitations
Both features are limited based on which Notion plan your workspace is on.
Version history can only go back 7 days on the Free plan, 30 days on the Plus plan, 90 days on Business, and Unlimited on Enterprise.
Pages get deleted from the Trash after 30 days on all plans except the Enterprise plan, where workspace owners can change this time period to be between one day and 10 years after deletion – so lots more flexibility there!
Now, let’s talk about Wikis.