I just made a crap ton of changes to my document that I really wish I could revert, but my undo/redo history doesn’t go back far enough. It’s going to be a massive pain to just put it all back the way it was manually because the thought web I’m working on right now is really complex with lots of overlapping interconnections.
This is more of a basic file management question than anything to do with Scapple specifically, if I understand you correctly. Undo hits a wall (usually with the last point where you opened), and if that’s not good enough you have to find an earlier copy of the file in your backups from yesterday, or the nearest to that.
Yeah, I know that would usually be the case. But in this case, my undo history doesn’t go back to the point where I last opened the file. Not something I’ve encountered before with anything but Scapple, at least not noticeably. It’s happened once or twice before with Scapple but the issue wasn’t enough of a pain for me to bother with finding a technical solution. Can you tell me how to access my backups? I’ve looked, but I don’t see a “project folder” for Scapple like I do for my Scrivener projects. I know where to find my Scrivener backups in that folder. Where do I find them for Scapple? For reference, I’m using the latest version (I think), Windows 11 Pro.
Hmm, I have never encountered an undo wall like that myself—but I typically just roll back to a backup anyway if I’ve got a huge amount of reversion I want to do, rather than putting a proverbial brick on Ctrl+Z and getting some tea. I don’t think there is an artificial limitation, nor would there typically be a reason for it to cut off. So you may have in fact encountered a bug of sorts. Where the undo cuts off may help jog your memory as to what you were doing around that point in time. If you think of any patterns, let us know.
Can you tell me how to access my backups? I’ve looked, but I don’t see a “project folder” for Scapple like I do for my Scrivener projects. I know where to find my Scrivener backups in that folder. Where do I find them for Scapple? For reference, I’m using the latest version (I think), Windows 11 Pro.
Well that’s going to be up to your backup system, whatever you use, I don’t know how to advise on that. For myself I use a combination of:
- A daily external hard drive backup of my user folder.
- An online backup service that runs in the background constantly and saves versions as I save files (this is my go-to extended undo). For some people this might also be a cloud sync service that provides limited version roll-back.
- A more periodic full system backup stored separately from the first. Rarely do I use this for anything, but it’s there in case my whole system crashes. I can then get back up to speed relatively quickly and use a more recent user folder backup to get my data back up to present.
If you’re not doing any of that, or similar, then today is a good day to start.
P.S. we added a new setting to Scapple in the General tab that disables auto-save. You might consider using that if you don’t want to keep your system backed up. Choosing when to save, so you can roll back to the last save point, is a form of strategy that gets lost with aggressive auto-saving. With Scrivener you’ve got snapshots and such to help control it, but Scapple is just a simple document editor: open, save, close.