Version History: Beyond Ctrl+Z
Ctrl+Z is reassuring right up until you rely on it for the wrong thing. It works great for undoing the last badly written sentence, but that undo stack only lives inside the open session: it empties out when you close the program, and it doesn't help anyway if the problem isn't the last edit but something you changed three weeks ago without realizing it should have stayed the way it was. A novel gets written over months, with rewrites that overlap weeks apart: the problem that needs solving isn't "undo the last thing," it's "take me back to how this chapter looked before I started touching it."
The problem Ctrl+Z doesn't solve
It happens to almost anyone writing a long novel: you pick a chapter back up after weeks, rewrite a section, and two chapters later realize the earlier version worked better — but in the meantime you've saved, closed, and reopened the file dozens of times, and any text editor's undo stack vanished long ago. At that point the only version that exists is the current one, and "how it was before" survives only in memory, which for a three-thousand-word chapter is never precise enough.
What you actually need: points in time, not just the last step
The difference between Ctrl+Z and a real version history is the difference between a step backward and a point in time you can return to. A history that's useful for a long novel needs three things together: frequent automatic saves, so you never lose work to a moment's distraction; snapshots at wider intervals, which stay as fixed points even after hundreds of small edits; and the ability to freeze a version by hand, the moment you know you're about to make a substantial change and want a safety net ready.
In NovLore it works like this: the editor saves on its own a few seconds after you stop typing, so you never lose work; every chapter also takes an automatic snapshot at regular intervals, regardless of how much you're editing it; and from the History popover you can freeze a version at any moment with one click, before a major rewrite, with the date and the total version count always visible.
AI edits: why they need a different rule
Edits made with AI deserve extra caution compared to ones written by hand, because they tend to arrive in bigger, faster chunks than a manual rewrite — it's easy to accept one, keep writing on top of it, and only later realize the previous version had something worth keeping. That's why, before applying any AI-generated edit to the text, NovLore automatically freezes a copy of how the chapter read right before — without you having to remember to do it yourself. If the edit doesn't convince you, the previous version isn't lost anywhere: it's right there, timestamped, ready to be restored.
Why it isn't a paid feature
Keeping a version history has a storage cost, but it's small and predictable — nothing like the variable cost of every call to an AI model, which is the only thing that has a price in NovLore. Being able to go back safely shouldn't be a luxury reserved for whoever paid more: it's a basic safety net for anyone writing something that takes months, which is why it stays free and unlimited for every book, just like the editor itself.
Frequently asked questions
How many old versions stay available before they're deleted?
Versions don't have an automatic time-based expiry: they stay attached to the chapter for as long as the chapter exists. What changes over time is only how often they're created — the automatic snapshots at regular intervals, plus whatever points you freeze by hand — not how long they're kept.
If I delete a chapter by accident, do I lose its version history too?
Deleting a chapter moves it to the trash, it doesn't erase it right away: for 30 days it stays recoverable along with its entire version history, exactly as if it had never been touched. Only after 30 days without being restored is it removed for good.