A notes app with version history built in
Every page in Locus keeps up to 60 snapshots of its own past — plus a daily backup of the whole workspace and 30 days of grace for anything you delete. All of it local, none of it metered by a plan.
The quiet fear in every notes app is the overwrite: you rework a page, close it, and the earlier version stops existing. Most tools answer that fear with a subscription tier — history for 7 days, 30 if you pay, forever if you pay more. Locus answers it with layers on your own disk: snapshots for the page, a daily backup for the workspace, a grace period for deletions, and a file format your own backup tools can see. Nothing to enable, nothing to renew.
Four layers between you and “it's gone”
01Snapshots, per page
Every page keeps up to 60 version snapshots you can browse and restore. Cutting a paragraph stops being a decision about whether you might want it back — the old draft is still there, next to your workspace, on your own disk.
02A daily backup of everything
Once a day, Locus writes a backup of the whole workspace beside the original. Snapshots protect a page from an edit; the daily backup protects the workspace from a bad afternoon.
03Thirty days of grace
Deleted pages wait in Recently Deleted for 30 days before they're gone. Deleting is an action you can walk back, not a cliff edge.
04And your own backups see it all
Because the workspace is a normal, human-readable file in Application Support, Time Machine — or any backup tool you already trust — versions it automatically. No integration, no export ritual: your existing habit is the fourth layer.
History as a property of ownership
Version history that lives on someone else's server is really a rental agreement about your own past. Because a Locus workspace is a readable local file, its history belongs to the same owner as the notes — you. That's one consequence of the architecture spelled out in local-first notes. Writers, who feel the overwrite fear most keenly, get the full picture — focus mode, themes, and fearless revision — on the notes app for writers page, and the rest of the safety story lives on the private notes app page.
Questions people ask
How do I get an old version of a note back?+
In Locus, open the page's version history, pick the snapshot you want, and restore it — each page keeps up to 60. If the damage is wider than one page, yesterday's automatic backup of the whole workspace is sitting next to the original file, and Time Machine reaches back further still.
Does version history depend on the cloud?+
No — and in Locus it can't, because there is no cloud. Snapshots and daily backups are written to your own disk, next to the workspace file. History works on a plane, on a train, and on a Mac that has never seen this decade's Wi-Fi.
Is version history the same as a backup?+
They answer different mistakes. Version history is per-page and fine-grained: “this edit was wrong.” A backup is whole-workspace and coarse: “this day was wrong.” Locus keeps both automatically, and your own backup tool adds a third ring around everything.
Does Apple Notes keep history?+
Not edit history. Deleted notes wait in Recently Deleted for 30 days — genuinely useful, and free — but there's no list of earlier versions of a note to browse: overwrite a paragraph and the old wording is gone the moment it syncs. Time Machine can resurrect the whole database from a past day, which is a blunter instrument. Per-page, browsable history is the thing Locus adds.
How do other notes apps handle this?+
Unevenly. Apple Notes recovers deleted notes for 30 days but keeps no edit history — an overwritten paragraph is simply gone. Notion's page history is metered by plan, measured in days on the free tier. Obsidian's file recovery snapshots are solid, with longer history tied to its paid sync. The pattern to notice: history is often a feature of the subscription, not of the app. In Locus it's a property of the file.
Is history every keystroke?+
No — a page keeps up to 60 snapshots, which keeps history browsable instead of becoming a scroll of near-identical moments. For keystroke-level regret there's undo, which in Locus reaches across everything you do in a session.
Free while in development · macOS 14 or later