Restore Version vs Restore Tree

When the need arises to restore pages to a previous state, there needs to be some understanding on how the specific functions work, or you risk losing potentially hours or more of current content.

If you haven't already, take a look at our Creating and Reverting to a Previous Page Version guide to understand versions using the Timeline view. This guide involves the Restore button in the AEM Admin "Ribbon" that pops up when hard-selecting a page.

With the Restore button on the Ribbon, we want to ensure to hard-select the parent of the item(s) we want to restore to a previous version. This is unlike the Timeline method where you would be selecting the actual page you wanted to restore.

After clicking Restore, you have 2 options:

• Restore Version
• Restore Tree

The Restore Version button in the dropdown will take the user to a page that lists all versions for child pages within the selected parent.

Here we see the Page Template icon used for each page, the Title and Internal Name, Restore To Version, the Version's Comments (if any), and Restore Status.

By default, the Restore To Version column will have the most recent version loaded that isn't the current version. You may click on the dropdown in this column for a given page to get a list of other available versions to revert to, along with dates/times of these. Do this for any and all pages.

Once you are ready to restore, simply hard-select each page to be included and then click the blue Restore button. The AEM instance will refresh the page and your selected page will be restored to the bottom of the current directory.

In the list, users may note some pages are "grayed out" with no template icon and have a Restore Status of "Previously Deleted." These indicate pages that no longer exist within the directory, whether they were deleted by accident or intentionally, and you are able to restore these pages for up to 30 days. Deleted pages lose their Archived status and are completely deleted after 30 days.

*Note: When a given page was being deleted, the checkbox for "Archiving" the page before deletion must have been checked on that prompt in order to recover it here.

To recover these items, simply hard-select them and click the blue Restore button. The AEM instance will refresh the page and your selected page will be restored to the bottom of the current directory.

Restoring a Tree is similar to Restoring a Version, with the difference being that with a Tree, you are setting every page in that directory (children included) back to a version based on a specific timeframe. Whatever latest version exists for the pages on that date will be used, and all data will be reverted.

There are few notable options that exist:

• Latest Versions at Date: This field is user-populated with the date that the user wants to revert all pages in this path to.
• Preserve Non Versioned Pages: In the image above in red, this option will preserve any non-versioned pages from being deleted when checked, since these items did not exist at that point in time with a valid version to revert to. If unchecked, any pages that are grayed in the Revised Structure list and marked as "Not Versioned!" will be deleted when the tree is restored.
• Revised Structure: This list shows the current tree structure of the path with the parent (selected page) at the top. Each page is listed with its Title, internal name, date/time of most recent version, and specificity if it has further previous versions. This list will also gray out pages that don't have current, valid versions to revert to if they are being kept via the Preserve Non Versioned Pages option.

Once decided on, click on the blue Restore button to push your changes into effect.