History and Restore

Every time your work saves, Berdee records what changed. History is that record: a running list of what you did to this lesson and when, with the ability to look at any point in the past and — if you want it back — restore your draft to it.

The thing to know before anything else: restoring changes your draft and nothing else. Students keep the version they were assigned. Marketplace buyers keep the version you published. Nothing reaches either of them until you assign or publish, exactly as if you had retyped the old content yourself.

History and versions are not the same thing

They are easy to confuse, and the difference is the whole story:

• History is _every change you make_. It is your private working record — the edits, the experiments, the thing you undid five minutes later. Only you can see it.
• A version (v1, v2, v3) is _a snapshot students or buyers actually receive_. Versions are created deliberately: assigning a lesson to a classroom snapshots one, and publishing to the marketplace snapshots one.

History contains your versions — they appear on the timeline as marked points — but the reverse is not true. Hundreds of edits can sit between v2 and v3, and nobody but you ever knows they happened.

Opening History

Two ways in, both in the Studio's top bar:

• Click the save status — Saved 14:32 — the quickest route when it is showing. It appears once a save has landed.
• Or open the ⋯ menu and choose History. This one is always there, including right after you open a lesson and while a save is failing.

• Left — a read-only preview of whichever point you have selected, with the changes that point recorded listed underneath it.
• Right — the timeline, newest at the top.

While History is open the editor is read-only. Undo, delete, paste and nudge shortcuts do nothing, so you cannot change today's lesson by accident while looking at last week's. Back to editor takes you back to the scene and selection you left.

Opening History at your published version

On a listed lesson with edits you have not published yet, the top bar reads Unpublished changes since v3 · View. Clicking it opens History on your current draft — so the preview starts on exactly what you are about to publish — with v3 scrolled into view below and a summary of everything recorded since it: Recorded changes since v3. Load older changes is still available to go further back, and selecting v3 itself shows you what your buyers are on today. It is the quickest way to answer "what am I about to publish?" before you press Publish. See Publishing updates to listed lessons.

The timeline shows the changes Berdee recorded. If a stretch was not recorded, the timeline says so where it happened, rather than quietly leaving it out.

Reading the timeline

Current draft sits pinned at the top — that is your lesson as it stands right now. Below it, entries run backwards in time, split by session ("Today · 14:14 – 14:48") so a long history reads as the days you actually worked.

Each entry says what happened and when:

• Resized Name Input — an edit to a widget, named as it was called at the time.
• Added Text 3 to Scene 2 — where it happened, when that helps.
• Ask Berdee: added a warm-up scene — changes Ask Berdee made for you appear like any other entry.
• Restored to Aug 12, 15:04 — restoring is itself a change, so it is recorded too.

Versions stand out as marked points: Published v3 with the release note you wrote, v2 · assigned for the snapshot an assignment created, v3 · removed for a version that was pulled.

Only the most recent stretch loads at first. Load older changes at the bottom fetches the next stretch, so a lesson you have worked on for a year opens as quickly as one you started this morning.

A ×3 badge means one action, not three

If you drag the same widget's resize handle three times in a row, you did one thing — size it right — and History says so: one entry reading Resized Name Input with a ×3 badge for the repeats folded into it.

The rule is roughly what you would guess:

• The same kind of change to the same thing, close together in time, folds into one entry.
• Doing something else in between breaks the run. Move A, move B, then move A again is three entries, because that is three separate intentions.
• Creating things never folds. Adding two widgets is always two entries, even back to back — each one is its own act.

Previewing a point

Click any entry and the left panel loads the lesson as it was, captioned State after these changes. Underneath, a short strip lists the recorded changes in this entry — the individual edits that folded into that line.

The preview is playable. Click buttons, answer a question, step through scenes: it behaves the way it would for a student, so you can check whether an old version actually worked better before deciding anything. Nothing you do in the preview touches your draft.

With the timeline focused, ↑ and ↓ move through entries and load each preview as you pause on it, which makes scanning a long stretch quick. Enter or Space selects the entry you are on.

Restoring

With a point selected, use Restore this point at the top (a version reads Restore v3). A confirmation appears first, naming the moment you are going back to and spelling out what it will and will not affect.

Confirm and the button reads Restoring… until the save lands — Berdee waits for the server to take the write before saying anything happened. Then the dialog closes and you are back in the editor, with a line beside the save status naming what just happened: "Restored to Aug 15, 14:14 · Undo". It sits there until your next edit. If the save fails, the dialog stays open, says so, and offers Try again.

Two variations you may see:

• Restore to before these changes goes back to the moment _just before_ the selected entry instead of just after it — useful when the entry you are looking at is the thing you want gone. It is unavailable on the oldest entry, which has nothing before it.
• Restore stays unavailable while an entry's detail is still loading, and on Current draft — you are already there.

What restoring does not do

This is the part educators actually want answered, so plainly:

• Students do not move. Anyone already assigned keeps working from the version they were given. To bring them to your restored content, assign the lesson again or use Push a new version to students.
• Buyers do not move. If your lesson is listed, marketplace buyers keep the last version you published until you publish again — see Publishing updates to your listed lessons.
• A student mid-attempt is never disrupted, restore or no restore. That has always been true and restoring does not change it.
• Your lesson's settings stay put. History covers your lesson's _content_ — scenes, widgets, styling, logic. Title, description, grade levels and subjects are settings, not content: they never appear as entries, and restoring never changes them.

Restoring is reversible

Your current draft is already a point in History — it got there the moment it saved — so restoring never throws it away. Three ways back:

1. Undo in the confirmation line, right after the restore.
2. Cmd/Ctrl + Z, which treats a restore like any other edit.
3. Reopen History and restore the point you were at before. It is sitting near the top of the timeline.

When History cannot tell you everything

History is honest about its own gaps rather than quietly pretending to be complete.

• Missing media. A point in the past may use an image, audio or video file you have since deleted from your media library. Restoring still works — those spots show a placeholder until you put something back in them.
• A point that cannot be opened. Very occasionally a snapshot cannot be read back. The preview says Can't preview this version and Restore is switched off with the reason, rather than letting you restore something broken.
• Marked gaps. If a stretch of changes was not fully recorded, the timeline marks it: "Some changes here weren't recorded. Restore points before and after are complete." Recording can also be switched off for a while, and while it is, the top of the timeline says so instead of leaving you to guess.
• Restore points follow saves, not keystrokes. Berdee saves a moment after you stop working, so two quick changes can land in the same save and share one restore point. Restoring either lands on the same place. In practice that window is a few seconds.

How far back History goes

History keeps going back as far as your lesson does — but it gets less detailed with age, the way a diary you flip back through gets thinner the further you go.

• Today — every save. If you want the state from four minutes ago, it is there.
• The last month — one point per change. A run of small tweaks to the same thing becomes the single entry you already see in the timeline ("Resized Name Input ×3"), and that entry is the point you restore to.
• Older than a month — roughly one point per hour of work.
• Older than a year — roughly one point per day you worked on it.

Two things worth knowing. Older points are thinned, not deleted: you can still go back years, you just land on a nearby moment rather than an exact one. And every version you published or assigned is kept forever, exactly as it was — those are the ones students and buyers received, and nothing here touches them.

So if you glance back at last spring's work and find fewer points than you remember seeing at the time, that is this, working as intended.

Who can see your History

Only you. History is not shared, not sold with your lesson, and not visible to anyone you sell to:

• Buyers see only the published changelog they see today: the version numbers, when each was published, and the release note _you_ wrote.
• Students see only the version assigned to them.
• Ask Berdee cannot read your History.

The edits along the way — what you tried, how many times you rewrote a scene, how long it took — are yours alone.

Tips

• History is the long-range tool; Cmd/Ctrl + Z is the short-range one. Undo covers your recent moves in this session; History goes back across days and reloads.
• Before a big rework, you do not need to duplicate the lesson "just in case" — where you are now is already a restore point.
• Preview first, restore second. The preview is playable for exactly that reason. To practise the whole round trip on a deleted scene, try Bring back a scene you deleted with History.
• If your lesson is listed, restoring is not publishing. Look back, restore, keep editing — buyers see none of it until you publish.

Related

• Saving and auto-save — how every entry in History gets there
• Publishing updates to your listed lessons — what happens if you restore and then publish
• Push a new version to students — bringing assigned students forward
• Preview and test a lesson — the same player, running your current draft
• Lesson Lifecycle — where restoring fits into building and improving a lesson