I was editing a long document today, and was thankful for the new Versioning feature. As I used it, I had a couple ideas for additions I’d like to see.
Restore as New Document
When you restore a document, it replaces the current live version. I’d think it’d be useful to have the option to either (a) replace the current document or (b) restore a version as a new file. Like how Apple’s Time Machine works.
Preserve important versions (?)
I’m not sure how to describe this, so I’ll just give it a shot. I was editing this long document over hours, and very quickly maxed out my version limit with edits from today. But then I realized I deleted something from yesterday that I wanted to get back, but that version was already gone.
I’d love the ability to avoid “filling up” my versions with edits from one long editing session. I’m not sure exactly what this would look like. Maybe it’d be the option to save the last version per day from X number of days. Or maybe the option to preserve a version and not have it be automatically deleted. Does this make sense to anyone else?
Show “current version” at the top of the list
When the Inspector panel is showing versions, it’d be helpful to have the “current version” listed at the top. Currently if you click a version, it will show it in the document window, but it is unclear how you get back to the current version (which you do now by clicking off the version in the list).
I think being able to mark versions as important or fixed would be a very interesting option. My idea would be to leave them out of the normal version count backwards, so that they do not interfere with the normal flow of the version.
That would make me entirely happy because what I usually do is create a new document by copying the previous one and adding the date or time in the name.
And being able to recover a previous version as a new document (e.g. adding the date and time it was saved) is also very interesting.
May I chime in with a quick question about how versioning works in DEVONthink?
I have a fairly large database that contains a lot of PDFs, but I also store my personal notes in the same database. I’d like to enable versioning only for the notes, since it doesn’t really make sense to track versions of the PDFs—they rarely change.
If I enable versioning on this database, will DEVONthink start using additional disk space to version all files, including the PDFs? Or is there a way to limit versioning to just the files that actually change (e.g., my notes)?
That’d be a great way to do it: promote a version to a permanent version. Combined with the idea from @rkaplan to be able to name them.
Right - this is a common enough work flow for me too. But I often don’t realize I should have saved a duplicate copy of a file until I am well into editing it. So being able to review the versions, and name and protect one from being deleted would be very helpful.
I’d like to add having the ability to see what the changes are. Either as highlighted text or some other way. If this exists now, I haven’t been able to find it, but it would be super helpful to see what the changes were between versions. Or, if the current version was listed at the top, selecting 2 versions and then being able to see them side-by-side would be helpful.
