Someone overwrote my records. Can I get them back?

A buying question, answered from the code rather than from the brochure · 20 September 2026

Yes. Every change ever made to a record is kept, with the name of the person who made it and the time they made it, and any earlier version can be put back. You do not need an admin, and you do not need us.

The limit, before the good news goes to your head

You put records back one at a time. If a colleague pasted over forty rows yesterday, that is forty records to open and forty versions to restore. There is no “undo everything this person did today” button, and no whole-app rollback.

We are putting that first on purpose. It is the part people need when they are upset, and it is the part that gets skipped when the reassurance comes first.

What you actually see

Open the record and click History. You get the list of every version of that record, newest first: who saved it, when, and which fields changed — field by field, not just “edited”. A record filed through a public form shows the form’s name rather than a stranger’s account.

Each earlier version has a Restore button. Pressing it shows you what would change before anything happens, so you can check it is the version you meant. Confirm, and the record goes back. A message appears with an Undo on it, in case it was not.

Nothing is destroyed when you restore

Restoring does not rewrite the past. It writes a new version on top of the current one, so the version you were on is still sitting in the history underneath. That is why the undo has an undo. It also means nobody can use a restore to quietly erase what happened — the trail shows the restore as its own entry, with the name of whoever did it.

Files attached to the record come back with it. If somebody removed an attachment and you restore a version from before that, the file is there again, because deleting a file here removes the link to it rather than shredding it.

Who is allowed to do it

Anyone who can edit that record. There is deliberately no rule saying you may only undo your own changes — the whole point is fixing somebody else’s mistake. The flip side is the honest one: if a record is restricted so that only certain people can edit it, the rest cannot restore it either, and they cannot read its history.

Two edges worth knowing

• History shows the most recent 100 versions of a record. If there are older ones, the screen says so rather than just stopping. For a record edited a few times a week that is years; for one a machine updates hourly it is days.
• A deleted record is a different screen. Deleting moves it to Trash, where you restore it whole. History is for a record that still exists and got changed.

Why this works the way it does

Not a feature that was bolted on. A record in Bionic Forms is not a row that gets overwritten — it is a stack of versions, each one a complete, sealed copy, and saving adds to the stack. There is no job anywhere that trims old versions, because the newest one is only meaningful as the top of the pile. That is also what makes two people editing on two laptops, offline, resolvable later: both edits exist, and neither has to win by arriving second.

Being straight about where we are: Bionic Forms is pre-launch. There is no iOS or Android app; the macOS, Windows and Linux desktop builds and the web app are what exist today, the Windows build is not code-signed yet so Windows warns the first time you run it, and we have no external customers to point at. Every claim on this page was read out of our own source code before it was written, including the limits.