Getting an earlier version back

There’s no save button in Pellet — it writes as you type. Which raises a fair question: what happens when you delete a paragraph you wanted?

What gets kept

Pellet snapshots your files locally, on the device that made the change. Open a note’s history — the clock icon in its header — and you get a list of earlier versions with the time each was written. Look at one, compare, and restore it if it’s the one you want.

It isn’t one snapshot per keystroke, which would be thousands of near-identical copies of the same paragraph. Instead:

• Ordinary edits snapshot at most once every 10 minutes per file. Type for an hour and you get roughly six versions of that note, not six hundred. You can change the interval in Settings.
• Deletions and incoming sync writes always snapshot, with no interval and no rate limit. These are the moments where a version disappears without you having typed anything, so they’re never skipped.
• Snapshots older than 30 days are cleared out. That’s also a setting.
• The whole thing is a toggle — Keep version history in Settings. Turn it off and nothing is recorded from that point on.

Notes, tasks and canvases are all covered. History is stored inside your vault, in .pellet/history.

This covers the ordinary disasters: text deleted and not noticed for an hour, a note overwritten with the wrong thing, an edit made in the wrong file. What it won’t reliably give you is the exact state of a note ninety seconds ago, or anything from last year.

Two things it is not

It’s not a backup. History lives on the same disk as your vault. A dead drive takes both. Use Time Machine, a cloud drive, an external disk — see where your notes live.

It’s not shared between devices. History is per-device, because it records what that machine did. Your laptop doesn’t hold the history of edits made on your phone.

Deleted notes

Deleting a note moves it to Pellet’s Trash, listed at the bottom of the sidebar, where you can restore it. Emptying the Trash is the point of no return — after that only your own backups can help.

Sync writes are atomic

A detail that matters more than it sounds. When sync applies a change from another device, it doesn’t write over your file directly. The incoming content goes to a temporary file, gets read back and hash-checked, and only then is renamed into place. If the power dies mid-way you get the whole old file, never half a new one — and if the check fails, the write doesn’t happen at all.

That’s the path where it matters most, because it’s the one writing content you didn’t type and can’t see arriving. Your own saves as you type are plain writes, and every one of them is a file you have open in front of you.