(Archived) Feature Request: Wiki style revision history

[ashrust 1]

Hi,

Apologies if this has already been mentioned.

I do quite a lot of writing in Evernote but I'm always scared of making a bad revision or losing a critical part of some text I'm editing. I'd love to see the option to keep a history of revisions for a particular note, as occurs on various wiki sites. This could also lead into a collaborative editing feature for shared notebooks.

Thanks

ash

[ashrust 1]

So has this already been mentioned? Is it good/bad?

[engberg 89]

History notes can be a bit of a double-edged sword, since it makes it harder to get rid of things that you actually want to remove (for privacy reasons).

You may want to consider exporting your notes for backup purposes. You can do this by selecting a set of notes, or by selecting a notebook and then asking to export it. This will make a local file with a snapshot of the relevant notes. You can later import this to get back a copy of those notes.

[ashrust 1]

I agree there are privacy concerns but if there's only an option to preserve the history, rather than a requirement, this would mitigate the issue. In addition, it's a fairly simple algorithm to delete parts of a document's history and preserve the edits which a user might wish to retain.

thanks

ash

[KarstenSilz 0]

I agree. I would really like to say automatic versioning of at notes that are not just files. This wouldn't use up a whole lot of space, I imagine, since it's mostly text changes that get stored. As suggested, this can be an optional feature. As with a Wiki (or Apple's time machine), you must be able to browse the history and compare versions. Later on, you could add versioning of binary files, such as Office documents, PDFs and images.

[ug2b 0]

I agree. I would really like to say automatic versioning of at notes that are not just files. This wouldn't use up a whole lot of space, I imagine, since it's mostly text changes that get stored. As suggested, this can be an optional feature. As with a Wiki (or Apple's time machine), you must be able to browse the history and compare versions. Later on, you could add versioning of binary files, such as Office documents, PDFs and images.

I totally agree with Karsten here... I would really like automatic versioning of all notes that are not files.

[ecerulm 17]

Me too, this feature would be really helpful indeed.

[rwestafer 0]

Privacy vs. Audit Trail... which is a more likely problem? Fewer users are probably worried about this degree of privacy than those concerned about revision history, or an audit trail: patent notebooks, business records, "undo" capability, etc. Survey the users?

Really, why was the feature removed? I seems like there was technical difficulty. Did the revision history copy entire notes? This would become very wasteful. Automatic capture of revision history could also be problematic. Really, I doubt EverNote was ever intended to substitute for a version control system like subversion or CVS. Still, a little effort in this direction would be much appreciated.

Suggested Solution:

Simply click a button to annotate a note. Think of it as notes attached to notes. This allows a user to determine whether to modify the original note (altering its modification time), or to click a button to create a new (attached) note. Such "links" are easily stored in most relational databases. You could even implement this (on the back-end) using the existing tag system. Using special random alphanumeric tags or database keys, notes could be clustered into groups, and the unique group IDs need not be revealed to the user. It would be some sort of auto-tagging.

[johnfk 0]

I would strongly favour a wiki-style organization. I just had an issue with a Note's additions getting deleted by a sync mistake. This syncing feature with several clients is great, but fragile. A wiki-style would have backed me up. I understand the privacy issue, but as long as you do not share notes, there is none, is there? And in shared notes, you should be aware of what you type or upload anyway.

[phutkins 1]

Absolutely! This is of importance for those of us who use notes on multiple computers. I don't know how many times I've "screwed up" a note by editing it on my iPhone or Mac or work PC, thus completely losing the previous contents of the note. Wiki-style revision history, even if very coarsely granular, would be a godsend.

Seems like the perfect feature for the paid account level. I'd upgrade for it!