Viewing Versions

Every file and folder in Poly carries its complete history: every edit, rename, move, tag change, comment, and conflict, each attributed to whoever made it. There are two ways to look at it.

In the app: Flashback

Version history in Poly is browsed on a timeline. Turn on View → Flashback and the history of whatever you're looking at — a file or a whole folder — appears as events on a timeline you can scroll through. Each event shows who made the change, what kind of change it was, and the file as it looked at that revision.

From any event you can:

• Open file at revision — view the historical version without touching the current one
• Download revision — save the old bytes to disk
• Copy file at revision — materialize the old version as a new file
• Revert this change or Roll back to this — actually recover (revert / restore)

Flashback is much more than a version list — it re-renders your whole view at any moment in the past. It has its own page.

From the terminal

poly file history prints the same history:

# The last 20 changes to a file
poly file history //Home/docs/report.pdf

# Changes in a date window, oldest first
poly file history //Home/docs/report.pdf --from "june 1" --to "june 30" --ascending

Each entry has a revision ID, which every history-aware command accepts through --at — alongside fuzzy times like "yesterday" or "June 26 8pm":

# What did this file look like yesterday?
poly file show //Home/docs/report.pdf --at yesterday

# Read the content of a specific revision
poly file read //Home/docs/report.pdf --at 018f3c2a

# List a whole folder as it was last Tuesday
poly ls //Home/docs --at "last tuesday"

What a version records

Because Poly versions each property of a file independently, history entries are precise about what changed: a rename shows the old and new name, a move shows where from and where to, an edit points at the previous content, and a conflicting edit is preserved and labeled as such. That precision is what makes reverting a single change safe.