Recovering Files
Poly versions everything. Every edit, rename, move, tag change, and deletion becomes a revision in the file's history. Moreover, you can view individual changes in the Activity panel, or browse your entire drive at a particular point in the past via the Flashback feature. Even conflicting edits are preserved, so you can recover any version of any file at any time.
How versions are stored
A file in Poly is a bundle of properties so each property is versioned independently. When something changes, you'll see that a new version is shown in the activity panel. From there, you can roll a file back to an exact instant, or undo one specific change while keeping everything that happened after it.
Conflicts are first class citizens
When two people (or two of your devices) edit the same file at nearly the same time, the earlier edit to sync wins. Any parallel edits are stored as conflict revisions, appear in the file's history labeled as conflicting edits, and can be opened, peeked, downloaded, or restored like any other version.
Offline changes are navigable and sync in bulk
The desktop app applies your changes to its local cache immediately so your UI is always responsive. Each change is also queued in a persistent dispatch queue that remains across restarts of the app, and when the network returns, the queue drains in bulk, in dependency order (a folder move lands before the edits inside it), with automatic retries. The queue survives restarts, so work done on a plane syncs itself when you land, and everything you did offline shows up in the version history just as if you'd been connected.
History lives on your device too
Clients don't just fetch history; they sync it. The server keeps compressed snapshots and paged history for each drive, and your device downloads and stores them locally, tracking exactly which time ranges it has. The result: traversing history is a local database read, which is what makes Flashback feel instant, and lets you browse history offline entirely.
In this section
- Viewing Versions — see a file's history and open any revision
- Flashback — scrub through time and watch your files as they were
- Restoring Versions — roll a file or folder back to a point in time
- Reverting Changes — undo one specific change
- Limitations — the few cases recovery won't touch