Flashback

Flashback is time travel for your files. Open it and your current view — a folder, a file — gains a timeline of its entire past. Scroll, and you're not looking at a list of version entries: the view itself rewinds, re-rendering your folder or file exactly as it existed at the instant under the cursor. It's the fastest way to answer "what did this look like on Tuesday?" — and to get Tuesday back.

Enable it from the main menu: View → Flashback.

The timeline

Flashback's timeline is a vertical strip beside your view, newest at the top. A fixed red rule marks the selected instant — the timeline scrolls underneath it while the rule (and your selection) stays put. Around it you'll find:

• Time ticks at every scale from seconds to years, with finer sub-ticks fading in as you zoom.
• Event pills — one per change, placed at the moment it happened: who did it (avatar), what they did (created, edited, moved, updated, commented on, made a conflicting edit to…), and the file it touched, shown with its name and thumbnail as of that revision. In folder scope you also see structural events — files added, moved in, moved out, removed.
• A LIVE marker at the present, and an origin tick at the moment the file or folder was created — the two ends of its history.
• A date field, if you'd rather type a moment than scroll to it.

Navigation

Everything about moving through time is direct manipulation:

• Scroll to move through time — scrolling down moves into the past.
• Drag the strip to scrub; a flick keeps coasting with momentum, like spinning a dial.
• Pinch (or ⌘+scroll) to zoom, smoothly, from one second per step to about six months per step — the same gesture takes you from "which save was it?" to "which quarter was it?".
• Arrow keys step the selection by exactly one tick at the current zoom.
• Click an event pill to jump straight to that change.
• Land near the top and the selection snaps back to LIVE.

Continuous updates

While you're moving, Flashback continuously updates: the cursor and readout track your scroll in real time so you can skim years of history fluidly. You can open folders, preview files, and keep browsing, all as-of the selected moment. A pill in the navigation bar shows the pinned instant whenever you're in the past; click on × to snap back to the present.

Recovering from the timeline

Everything recoverable is one right-click away:

• Right-click the timeline at any instant: Set cursor here, Roll back folder to here (or Roll back file to here), Download at revision.
• Right-click an event pill: Open file at revision, Download revision, Copy file at revision, Revert this change, Roll back to this.

Roll back restores state to a point in time (Restoring Versions); Revert undoes just that one change (Reverting Changes); Copy at revision materializes the old version as a new file, leaving history untouched.

Why it's fast

Flashback runs on your local history cache. The first time you scrub into an uncovered era, Poly hydrates it, fetching a snapshot at that instant plus the history pages spanning it, and records the coverage. From then on, scrubbing across that range is a local database read: no network round-trips, no loading states, and it works offline.