Unlocking the Past: Restoring Earlier Versions of Your Document Online.
On Essential Tips for Writers on Medium and Substack.
Have you ever felt the frustration of losing your changes in Word, and hours of work, with no way to recover it? The good news is, when writing online, you automatically gain the advantage of 'versioning' – jargon for the ability of software to track changes over time. Platforms like Medium and Substack seamlessly save your previous versions, enabling you to restore them when needed.
Here’s how.
Medium
Before making changes, duplicate your current post (that you want to restore) to a new post in Drafts in case you want to avoid accidental overwrites.
If in draft mode on Medium, select the three-dot menu at the top right corner, choosing the option 'See Revision History.' You can see a granular history of the changes made as below.
For published posts, select 'Edit post' to access the same option in the ellipsis (…) menu.
The menu shows you the list of changes made since publishing the post.
For both modes, select the version you think is closest to the text you desire. The draft from that version opens up in the same window.
If you choose cancel, then you return to your current version, and if you choose to restore, than this version replaces your current version (hence step 1). If you simply want some text from this version, then copy and paste the text you need into a Word or Pages document on your computer and select cancel to leave the current version intact.
Be careful so you don’t accidentally overwrite the current version you prefer especially if you are trying to revert on a published post and the last saved version does not have all the changes.
Pro-tip: Always backup important files, no matter how small the task.
Substack
To restore earlier versions on Substack, use the menus located in the far bottom left of the editing screen, directly below the 'Draft' text. Similar to the process on Medium, ensure you save a copy by using the ‘Duplicate’ draft feature.
The clock is the icon for draft history, and the (i) indicates a post’s word count, estimated reading time, etc.
Select the clock to see a menu of recorded changes. Substack also autosaves often which is helpful. Unlike Medium, you don’t get any info from the top level menu, so you have to choose the version based on timestamps.
Choose the version you want to restore or review text from and the below menu appears on the upper right corner.
The '?' is a help text and a reminder that choosing a different draft will make you lose the 'Latest' version.
When you choose to restore, the post changes to an Edit mode with the restored version. Now, you are back to choosing publish or republish as earlier.
To cancel, simply select the back arrow in the upper left corner, and you will be returned to your working version without any reverts.
Post stats: Aside
The (i) tool in Substack is helpful to check post stats before publishing.
On Medium, you have to select all text (use keyboard shortcuts like Command-a on Macs or ctrl-a on Windows) to view the word count at the top.
Bonus Tips
Microsoft Word autosaves your document only if you save it to its OneDrive cloud. It does not autosave on your local computer. Auto backup options available on Word for local storage may not recover all the lost edits. You can use the ‘always save a backup copy’ feature of Word which duplicates files on your computer though it is not true versioning.
An alternate option is to consider using Google Docs (free with Gmail accounts) for autosaving working drafts outside Medium and Substack.
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There is so much valuable information here which I will check out later. Thank you Jayshree 💙✨
Jayshree, Thank you. This is most helpful. D