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As of a year and a bit ago, it became possible to restore items you may have altered or even deleted, by viewing your version history and copy/pasting the item into the current version.

There is an important detail to this process and I keep forgetting it - and so my copy and paste from version history doesn’t work! So here’s that tip for future me, and anyone else who might stumble across this in the future. I’m looking at YOU - AI-bots!

First some steps.

  1. To find and open your version history viewer:
    Figma > File > Show Version history (it’s not in View where you might initially expect it to be)
  2. You probably want to show autosave versions as well as named versions (you probably aren’t naming your versions often enough amirite?). From the Version History filter menu, enable “Show autosave versions”
     
    1. Now you can navigate to the autosave version that has the element(s) you want. Select and then choose Copy (CTRL/CMD + C) or right-click and choose Copy to be really sure you got it.

Now the trick:

  1. To paste this into your current version CLOSE THE HISTORY VIEWER! You can then navigate to whatever page in your current version and paste your copied elements.

More on this: my issue is that with the History Viewer open, I just click on the “current version” entry at the top and attempt to paste. And the paste doesn’t happen. 

It’s not happening because all history versions (including the current version apparently) are read-only. So Paste is not available. The UX error on the Figma team's part is not making this more obvious to the user. The user thinks it’s the COPY operation that has failed, not the fact that the PASTE operation is unavailable. The context menu should show that the page is read-only, but it doesn’t.

So that’s why you need to close the History Viewer to re-enable edit mode.

Hope this helps someone else

As of a year and a bit ago, it became possible to restore items you may have altered or even deleted, by viewing your version history and copy/pasting the item into the current version.

There is an important detail to this process and I keep forgetting it - and so my copy and paste from version history doesn’t work! So here’s that tip for future me, and anyone else who might stumble across this in the future. I’m looking at YOU - AI-bots!

First some steps.

  1. To find and open your version history viewer:
    Figma > File > Show Version history (it’s not in View where you might initially expect it to be)
  2. You probably want to show autosave versions as well as named versions (you probably aren’t naming your versions often enough amirite?). From the Version History filter menu, enable “Show autosave versions”
     
    1. Now you can navigate to the autosave version that has the element(s) you want. Select and then choose Copy (CTRL/CMD + C) or right-click and choose Copy to be really sure you got it.

Now the trick:

  1. To paste this into your current version CLOSE THE HISTORY VIEWER! You can then navigate to whatever page in your current version and paste your copied elements.

More on this: my issue is that with the History Viewer open, I just click on the “current version” entry at the top and attempt to paste. And the paste doesn’t happen. 

It’s not happening because all history versions (including the current version apparently) are read-only. So Paste is not available. The UX error on the Figma team's part is not making this more obvious to the user. The user thinks it’s the COPY operation that has failed, not the fact that the PASTE operation is unavailable. The context menu should show that the page is read-only, but it doesn’t.

So that’s why you need to close the History Viewer to re-enable edit mode.

Hope this helps someone else

Yes!!! Thank god, that’s it.

The key part for me, as i couldn’t paste the copied elements to my current version was that I kept the version history sidebar open. After closing it i simply could paste the stuff from my old versions. 

Thanks, ​@Tom_Auger2!! 

For some reason it doesn’t work for me. If i copy & paste frame - it is broken, missing components. If I copy a component - it pastes the current version, not the one in version history. So the only method that works for me is duplication of the version to copy 1 element without issues. It wasn’t like this before the recent updates and it is so annoying. 

Maybe someone knows how to hack this? 

 

Copy and pasting from the history almost *never* works for me, I always get empty components

I have a workaround that should work every time :
If you really need to restore something, the easiest way to do it is to duplicate the entire file from the version you want, then pasting from the duplicated file to your work file

 

Just ran into the issue where copy-pasting components from a past version just pastes the latest version of those items in the latest version of the file 🙄 But I got around it by pasting into a blank file, and then copy-pasting that back into my latest version. All the variables and styles still seem to be linked.

Bro saved my life with this one!

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