PERRLA Online now gives you the ability to view, download, and restore your PERRLA Online papers from any Save for that paper in the last 30 days.
Where to find recent paper saves
You can access a paper's recent saves in the Overview tab inside any of your APA, MLA, or Turabian papers. You can also find your paper's recent saves under the File menu inside the paper Editor.
Once in the Overview tab, you will find a list of any paper saves we've made within the last 30 days. In that list, you can see the date and time of the save, the action that triggered the save in PERRLA, a link to view a PDF of the paper at that time, a link to restore the paper to that save point, and a menu with options to download your paper from that save as a Word document or PDF.
How to restore your paper to a previous save
There are a couple of reasons you may need to access a previous save from one of your PERRLA Online papers:
- you want to keep a record of your paper at a certain point
- you updated a section of your paper and think it may have been better how it was before
- you accidentally saved over a portion of your paper from another computer
Whatever your reason, you can recover any of your paper's saves from the last 30 days and restore it to the active version of your paper. Here's how:
- Open your paper in PERRLA Online.
- Go to the Overview tab inside the paper.
- Locate the paper save you want to restore.
You can use the Action description and timestamp in the list to see what action triggered that save. If you aren't sure if a version has the content you need, use the Preview PDF link to open that version of the paper in a new tab. - Click Restore this version in the right column for the save you want.
- In the confirmation pop-up, select Restore my paper.
When we restore your paper, we'll create a new save for the paper using the content from the paper save you restored from. Then, we'll take you back to the Editor tab for the paper so you can get back to writing.
If you change your mind, you can follow this same process to restore the previous version of your paper or any other of the saved versions at any time.
Just to be clear: restoring your paper doesn't take you back in time to that point in the paper's history. We create a new save for your paper using the content from your paper's previous save - we keep all of your paper saves, versions, & restorations for 30 days.
How long does PERRLA keep previous saves?
We always keep the latest version of your paper - so you'll always have access to your papers in PERRLA.
We only keep the older versions of your paper for 30 days. This lets us give students a pretty long time to see what they've done while also balancing technical & performance needs.
After 30 days, we clean up the paper save history. This keeps our servers and your paper history from becoming too cumbersome with unused content.
If you would like to keep a version of your paper permanently, we recommend you download that version of your paper as a Word document or PDF.