Can I restore an old version of a note?

Yes. Harbor keeps a version history for every note, and restoring is one click.

Open a note’s history and you can browse what it looked like at earlier points, then revert to any version. Each note also has an activity timeline, so you can see the story of a note — when it changed and how — before deciding to roll back.

Harbor is also careful about the quieter way people lose work: editing the same note on two devices. Say you change a note on your Mac and, before it syncs, edit the same note on your phone in a coffee shop with no signal. When both come back online, Harbor doesn’t guess which edit matters and silently discard the other. It keeps yours and creates a conflict copy, so both versions are in your library and you choose what to keep. Never losing an edit is a design rule, not a best effort.

And if you delete a whole note, that’s recoverable too — deleted notes sit in the Trash until you restore them or empty it for good.

One honest caveat for switchers: version history starts when a note enters Harbor. Evernote’s ENEX export doesn’t include past versions, so imported notes begin their history on import day.

The one thing that wipes a note’s history

There’s a second caveat, and it’s the one that can actually cost you something: changing a note’s encryption deletes that note’s version history.

Encrypting a note discards its earlier, readable versions. Removing encryption discards the encrypted ones. Either way the note starts a fresh history from that moment, and the versions that went are gone from our servers permanently — the Trash doesn’t hold them and support can’t retrieve them. This applies however the note got encrypted, including by being moved into a notebook that encrypts.

It’s deliberate. Our servers can’t read an encrypted note, so they can’t seal its old plaintext versions either — leaving them would mean readable old copies sitting behind a padlock, which would make the lock meaningless. Deleting them is the honest option, and it’s why this is one of the few things in Harbor that genuinely can’t be undone.

The web app warns you before either direction. The other apps and the harbor command-line tool may not yet, so don’t rely on being stopped: if a note’s earlier versions matter, open its history and save what you need before you change its encryption.