How to Undo an AI Edit and Restore a Previous Draft
Version history and safe restore points for AI-assisted novel writing: how to undo a bad edit or roll back to an earlier draft without losing work.
A bad paragraph and a character note that quietly drifted off canon are different problems, and Quarkle undoes them differently: chapter History for your prose, Atlas note history for everything the Story Atlas keeps. This guide is about knowing which one to reach for.
Every chapter saves itself as a series of checkpoints as you write: automatically roughly every 250 words, or manually whenever you name one yourself. Open History in the left rail for a timeline of a chapter’s checkpoints.
The History timeline, with a diff of what changed.
Switch to Restore mode to compare any checkpoint against your current draft, then restore it if that’s what you want.
Restore mode: your current draft on the left, the checkpoint on the right, and the exact difference between them.
Restoring is never destructive. Quarkle saves your current draft as its own checkpoint first, so a restore is always itself reversible.
Restoring saves your current draft first, so nothing is lost.
Use this when: you want to roll back a chapter’s prose, whether that’s one bad AI rewrite you already accepted, or an entire session’s worth of edits that didn’t work out. Full reference: Version history.
Character notes, world notes, Book Notes, Memory, every note in the Story Atlas keeps its own full history, completely separate from chapter checkpoints. Open a note and its history shows just that note’s changes.
One note's history: the timeline filtered to a single note.
Open any past version to read it in full.
A past version, labelled and dated, under a Versions breadcrumb.
You can restore it outright, or edit it and save as a new version, either way your history is preserved, never overwritten.
Editing a past version saves it as a new version. History is never overwritten.
Use this when: a character or world note has drifted somewhere wrong, whether from an AI update you didn’t catch or your own edit you want to walk back. This is completely independent of chapter checkpoints, restoring a note has no effect on your prose, and restoring a chapter has no effect on its notes.
A character’s profile says something that’s no longer true
That note’s version history in the Atlas
Book Notes or Memory picked up something you didn’t want
That note’s version history
You’re not sure which, and it’s about the words on the page
Chapter History
You’re not sure which, and it’s about a fact Quarkle keeps
Atlas note version history
The one thing that prevents most “undo” situations before they start: freeze a note once it’s right. A frozen note can’t drift, because Quarkle simply won’t write to it again.
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