How to recover an earlier version of a document

Almost every lost document is lost the same way: nothing crashed, nobody deleted a file. Someone selected all, pasted the wrong thing, kept working, and only noticed twenty minutes later. Undo has moved on by then, and the file on disk is the broken one.

That is what version history is for. It is not a backup of the file — it is a running record of what the document looked like at different moments, so you can go back to any of them.

Get the old text back in three steps

1. Open the document and switch the right sidebar to the Versions tab. Each snapshot shows when it was taken and how big the document was — a sudden drop in size is usually the edit you are looking for.
2. Not sure which one? Open the document menu and choose Version history for the full view: the list on the left, a preview of the selected version on the right.
3. Press Restore. The document comes back as it was, and the newer snapshots stay in the list — restoring is reversible.

In Ettex, snapshots are written automatically while you edit — at most once every 15 seconds, only when the content actually changed, and the last 30 are kept. This is the everyday form of document version control, and the reason approvals should point at a frozen version.

Why “save as final-v2-FINAL.docx” fails

Manual versioning depends on remembering to do it at exactly the moment you are least likely to: mid-edit, in a hurry. It also multiplies files, and once two people have their own copies, merging them is a bigger job than rewriting the paragraph.

Automatic snapshots invert that. You do nothing while things go well, and the record is already there on the day something goes wrong. The cost is that history is bounded — you get recent history, not an archive going back a year. For documents where the long trail matters, keep the milestone versions as documents of their own.

Reading the list like a pro

• Size is the fastest signal. A version that is much smaller than the one before it is where the content disappeared.
• Time beats memory. Work back from when you last saw the text you want, not from when you noticed it was gone.
• Preview before restoring. The history view renders the selected version, so you can confirm the paragraph is there first.
• Restore, then keep editing. The restored content becomes the current version; nothing else is thrown away.

The same applies to sheets and decks

Spreadsheets and presentations are snapshotted too — a sheet version records how many cells were filled, a deck version how many slides it had. The same “that got much smaller” heuristic works for a deleted sheet range or a slide someone removed before a review.

Habits that make recovery unnecessary

• Duplicate before a risky rewrite instead of editing in place — a copy costs nothing.
• Turn a stable draft into a template if you will start from it again.
• Use comments and review mode for changes other people propose, so edits arrive as suggestions rather than overwrites.
• Star the documents you cannot afford to lose — they stay one click away in Favorites.

Version history is one of those features you ignore until the day it saves an afternoon of work. It costs nothing to know where the tab is before that day arrives.