Your Files & Sync
Version history & restoring earlier states
With a connected folder, visualOS quietly protects you from yourself: before anything substantial changes, the previous state is snapshotted. Restoring is one click — and can’t break anything.
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What gets saved, and when
Snapshots are written into a hidden .versions/ folder inside your connected folder — automatically, whenever something substantial is about to be replaced: before a newer state from another device is adopted, before a merge, before a restore, before an import. The most recent ~30 snapshots are kept; older ones rotate out.
Each snapshot is a complete copy of your master file — folders, elements, layout, everything.
Restoring an earlier state
- Open Settings → Versions
Gear icon in the top bar (⋮ menu on iPhone/iPad), then the Versions tab. You’ll see the list of restorable states with their dates.
- Pick a version
Click Restore next to the state you want. visualOS shows what it contains (how many folders and elements) before you confirm.
- Confirm — safely
Your current state is backed up first, automatically. If the restored version isn’t what you hoped, just restore the newest snapshot and you’re back where you were. You cannot lose data by exploring versions.
What version history is (and isn’t) for
- It is your safety net against big accidents: a merge you didn’t want, a folder gone missing, an experiment that got out of hand.
- It isn’t per-element undo — for “I just deleted this note”, plain Cmd/Ctrl+Z is faster (and works for deleted folders too, for a few minutes even including their files — see Undo, redo & the safety net).
No folder connected?
Then there’s nowhere durable to keep snapshots, and the Versions tab will ask you to connect a folder first. Until then, manual backup exports are your history.
Snapshots are ordinary JSON files named by date inside .versions/. They’re part of your folder, so your own backups (Time Machine etc.) preserve your history too.