The latest versions of Joplin adds support for note history. The applications (desktop, mobile and CLI) now preserve previous versions of the notes, so you can inspect or restore them later on as needed.
A common complain with many sync-based note taking apps is that they work in an opaque way - sometimes notes are changed or they disappear and it’s not clear why…
Full post over there:
Great feature and thanks for the nice article.
There are 2 scenarios that should be explained as well:
Then there is one sentence in the article that peaked my curiosity: Behind the scene, this is essentially already done since whenever a note is deleted, a final revision of that note is preserved. What’s missing is a user interface (i.e. the recycle bin) to view these deleted notes.
I think it’s very important to keep in mind that this final version must not be deleted when the days-to-keep threshold is reached.
Maybe you should limit the number of old versions too?
Yesterday I had an issue after I’ve edited many times a big note (> 1000 KB encrypted). Joplin ended up freezing 5 seconds after the start. Not sure if it’s related to the history. Unfortunately I had no time to look closer at it, just wiped out the directory and resynced.
Mobile? Desktop?
Desktop, Win 10 Pro.
Normally it saves a revision only every 10 minutes, and only the text that has been changed, so limiting the number of revisions should not be necessary. However it's possible there's a bug and too many revisions are created, but I would need more info to figure it out.
I copied content from a html file again and again into Joplin and finally it was broken. Unfortunately I can't give any more information because I was a bit nervous and just went to WSL to type rm -r. After that I could add the same content and everything was fine.
Would it be possible to include a comparison view for note history revisions?
Something like diff, where one could see one note revision on the left, another note revision on the right and could easily see the differences, colorfully distinguished.
That’s a great news. The app development is getting better every day.
Awesome feature, hope to support web api calls, this is a great feature for vscode plugin, all modern text editors should have history function to avoid unexpected errors
This is long after the fact but I am really liking Joplin. This feature saved my butt today. I will be sure to support your development.
Just signed up for Joplin after accidentally deleting an Office "Sticky Note" on android by somehow highlighting the entire note text and then when I tried to click somewhere else to unselect, the onscreen keyboard popped up right underneath my finger. So now my important list of things that I needed for work, is just "f".... 
@stoffejs, it's probably too late now, but there's actually an undo button in the mobile version, so normally it would have been possible to recover the text.
Great new feature!
I agree, the diff highlights would make it much easier to see the differences between versions. This is especially useful, as the typical use-case would be (I guess) finding a particular piece of text that was lost in the latest version of a note.
For simplicity, diff can only show the difference between current version vs any selected old version. There can be a button to activate/deactivate this diff mode.
Do exports preserve note history?
No
Many Thanks for this feature!
I was about to change to another tool just because of this (severely) missing capability.
I am now happy, but there is still some work to do on its integration into the clients.
BR
