Revisions: Revert Revisions

Revert Revisions is used to revert all the documents in the database to their state at a historical point in time.

When the process is executed:

• Documents created before the point in time will be kept.
  • Any of these documents that own revisions will be reverted to the revision created at the specified point in time or to the nearest revision preceding this time.
    

    When the number of revisions that a document may keep is limited (by number or age), only the most recent revisions are kept for it.
    It may thus happen, that the document was created before the specified point in time, but it currently holds only revisions that were created after that time.
    Such documents may be reverted to a revision newer than the specified time.
    By doing so we make sure that all the documents that existed at the time you specified still exist after reverting the database.
    

  • To revert a document to one of its revisions, RavenDB will create a new revision for the document that copies the historical revision, effectively replacing the live version of the document.
• Documents created after the specified point in time will be deleted.
• Database entities other than documents, such as ongoing tasks, indexes, and compare-exchange pairs, will not be reverted by this process.

To Revert Revisions, open the Studio Settings > Document Revisions view.

Document Revisions View

1. Document Revisions View
   Open the view to configure and revert revisions.
2. Revisions Configuration
   Our ability to revert database documents to their past revisions, and the accuracy of the reversion (how close we can get to the database state at the specified time), depend upon continuous creation of revisions.
   Make sure that a Revisions configuration that suits your needs is defined.
3. Revert Revisions
   Click to specify a point in time to revert the database to.

Revert Revisions

1. Point in Time
   Specify the point in time to revert documents to.
   Documents will be reverted to a revision that was created for them at the specified point in time, or to the nearest revision preceding this time.

   Clicking the Point in Time box will display the Revert Revisions scenario.
   The database will be reverted to the time displayed in the scenario in UTC.

   

   Revert Revisions Scenario

2. Time Window
   Set a Time Window value to limit the search by.
   Restricting the search to the set time window prevents RavenDB from conducting unnecessarily long searches and reversion to revisions that are too old.

   • To revert each document to its state at the specified point in time, RavenDB goes through the document's revisions in the revisions storage, where revisions are ordered by change vector, not by creation time.
   • The Time Window value sets a limit to the search.
     If the search reaches a revision whose creation time exceeds the time window limit, the search will end and the document will not be reverted.
   • the search limit is: Point in Time + Time Window
     

     E.g.

     If Point in Time is 2 days ago
     and Time Windowis 4 days
     the search will end if a revision that was created more than 6 days ago is reached.