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Restoring deleted content

Contents:

Undoing what you didn't mean to do.

Typo3 keeps an extensive history of the creation, deletion and changes to any content element or page.  Theoretically, according to the documentation I found the changes can go back from when the site was created and I also found another site that said there was a 200 change limit.  No matter how many changes it keeps, Typo3's history/undo is not infallible. 

And occasionally you'll get the following message:From this point on, there is no guarantee that a rollback reverts all changes, as changes of records prior to this message are normally not preserved.

Now there may very well be changes below this line.  If so, rollback carefully.it's always a good idea to proof read and hide things you are unsure of rather than deleting them.This is an example of what the history of a page may look like.

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Where you can find History/Undo

History/Undo can be found in the contextual menu of either pages or content elements in either the page module or the list module.   With Extended View turned on the list module also has History/Undo icons to the right of the page or the content element.  

One thing to note is that when you are in the list module of a page, you can access any of it's subpages content history by clicking on the subpage's History/undo icon. 

When you are in the history workarea there is a column called Table:UID.  This column will either say tt_content or pages.  It will then give you the uniqueID and the header or pagetitle. 

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History/Undo

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  1. Show Entries - how many do you want to see at once.  If you check the checkbox to the far right of each line  then "Marked" will show just those entries
  2. Show difference - the differences column will still be there but instead of exaclty what you changed, it will just show you what fields you changed
  3. Show sub elements - show this page's subpages and content on those subpages
  4. Show insert/deletes of records - Insert (see above) means that a new record or page was created.  Delete well it's obvious.  If you only want to see changes to the fields, pagetitle, navigation title, content text, header text etc, then change this to "No".
  5. The Changelog table shows you what was changed and if you have "Show differences" set to "Yes" it will also show you the differences.  The small arrow button at the left will initiate the rollback process (see below), the checkbox can be used to selectively choose what you want to check. 
  6. Columns in the change log:
    • Time - the date and time (military time) of the change - date is in day/month/year format
    • Age - approximately how old it is
    • User - who made this change (netid)
    • Table:uid - this won't mean much to the regular user but can mean a great deal to the webteam
    • Differences - shows the changes made.  The field is given (or Delete/Insert if something was deleted or added) Red is the old, Green the New.  Sometimes the content can be a bit cryptic here.  If you are not sure of a change contact the webteam (webteam@creighton.edu).

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How it works

So here I've typed in a typo and then saved the content.

I then went in and changed that content to this and saved.

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History workarea

I've also added a link to the text, a header, then changed the alignment of that header and it's type.  So let's take a look at the history.

 

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I want to change typo back to tipo so I click the small arrow button to the right of that row in the table or to any row below it.  The rollback workarea is for all changes after that date.  So if you click on bottom row of the above it will give you the ability to roll back all changes thereafter.

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Rollback Preview

The preview for rollback appears in the same work area as the changelog, just above it.  That way you can easily access other lines in the changelog for preview.  If you have a number of subpages and you have "Show sub elements" at the top set to yes, the rollback will show all the changes to the subpages and subpage content as well as the page you are on.

An example of a complex rollback - Click image for full size:

The preview will show you the changes (red old, green new) and what field the change occurred in.

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You have several options of how to rollback:

  • Rollback all changes shown
  • Rollback single record (the record maybe a page or it maybe a content element)
  • Rollback a single field

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Return to Tipo fix

Let's get back to the "tipo" fix. 

So we've got the history for that page up, we've clicked the "Rollback(preview)" arrow (button) and have the previews before us. And I'll click the "Change field" for the text where my error was made:

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Okay, it's changed back the way I want it!

And you'll notice that the changelog now contains that change (at the top) that fixed the change!  So you can rollback the rollback!

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