Version History for Diagrams

Snapshots happen for you

While you work, ArchBoard quietly saves compressed snapshots of the scene every few minutes. Recent ones are kept at fine granularity and older ones are thinned out: roughly one every five minutes for the past hour, hourly for the past day and daily for the past month. Storage stays bounded, and you rarely need to think about it.

Name the moments that matter

Before a risky rewrite, or when a design is approved, open Tools, then Version history, type a short name and save a checkpoint. Named checkpoints are never pruned. You can also rename an automatic snapshot to promote it, which is handy when you notice a good state after the fact.

Compare before you restore

Selecting a snapshot shows it side by side with the current scene and summarises what was added, removed or changed. If it is the one you want, restore it. The restore itself is safe: ArchBoard first saves your current state as a before-restore copy, so you can always go back to it from the same list.

Pages and exports as a complement

Use pages for alternative designs you want to keep visible together, and snapshots for the passage of time. For a permanent record outside the browser, export an SVG or PDF and commit it beside the code or the decision record it belongs to.

Habits that pay off

Save a named checkpoint before sharing a diagram, before restructuring it, and at the end of each working session if the design moved. Keep names short and dated, for example approved design review, so the list reads like a changelog. When you restore, look at the diff first; it takes a few seconds and prevents rolling back more than you meant to.

Try it with a template

• Blue-Green Deployment
• Strangler Fig Migration