Never lose an edit: versioning and backups in Plainva
I’ve overwritten a note I actually needed before — closed the file, reopened it, and the version I wanted was just gone. Local-first is supposed to mean the data is genuinely yours, not that you’re one bad save away from losing it. So Plainva keeps a couple of safety nets under every note, and I built them so I’d never have to think about them either.
Every save is a snapshot you can get back
Each time Plainva writes a note, it quietly stashes the version that came before. Right-click any file for version history and you get a timeline of everything that changed, a side-by-side diff, and a way to restore an old version or save it off as a copy. Delete something by accident? Restore deleted files brings it back the same way — an undo that survives closing the app, syncing to another device, and you remembering three weeks later that you actually needed that paragraph. How often it snapshots, how many versions it keeps, how long before old ones age out — all in settings, with defaults I was comfortable leaving alone. Deleting always snapshots first, and renaming carries the history along instead of orphaning it.
The backup I never have to remember to run
Once a day, quietly in the background, Plainva zips the whole vault into a backup folder — your disk, a NAS, wherever you point it — and keeps the last several. Nothing leaves your machine unless you decide to put it somewhere, and there’s no account behind any of it, nothing to subscribe to.
Cloud apps get this kind of safety net for free, because it’s their server anyway; a local-first app actually has to build it. I did, mostly because I wanted it under my own notes before I’d trust anyone else with theirs. It won’t replace a real backup of anything truly irreplaceable, but it’s the net I wanted, and now it’s under your vault too.
- More: backups and versioning
- Try it: plainva.com
— Marco