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”

   

    
   3. 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:

4. 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