Autosave and Version History: How Opionate Protects Your Work¶

Editing a survey draft - in the workspace yourself, or through a connected AI assistant like Claude - means a lot of small changes happening in sequence: a question added, a title tweaked, a section reordered. Opionate saves your work automatically as you go, and keeps a running history of those saves so a change you want to undo doesn't mean starting over or trying to remember what it used to look like.

What Gets Saved, and When¶

Any meaningful edit to a draft survey - adding, updating, deleting, or reordering a question or section; changing the title or description - gets saved as a version once it's actually different from what was there before. A save request that doesn't change anything (reopening a builder tab, for instance) doesn't create a new version - only genuine content changes do.

This applies the same way whether the edit came from you, working directly in the builder, or from an AI assistant editing the draft on your behalf through a connected MCP tool like Claude. Both paths write to the same version history - you'll see both kinds of edit side by side when you look back through it, each one labeled with how it was made.

Browser Edits vs. AI Edits¶

Every version is tagged with which channel made it - your own browser session, or an AI assistant. When you look through your version history, an AI-made edit is marked clearly (for example, "via Claude") so you always know whether a given change came from you directly or from an assistant acting on a request you made. See Restoring a Previous Version of Your Survey for what this actually looks like in the builder.

How Far Back You Can Go¶

Opionate keeps up to 50 versions per survey, automatically trimming the oldest ones once that limit is reached - this is meant as a safety net for active editing, not a permanent audit trail, so there's no need to manage or clean up old versions yourself.

Version history is wiped entirely once a survey is published. This is deliberate: once a survey is live and respondents may have already answered using the current set of questions, "restore an earlier draft state" stops being a coherent action - the questions and options respondents answered need to stay exactly as they were, not get swapped out from under already-collected responses. If you publish and later want to make changes, those changes start a fresh history of their own.

Classic Survey and Advanced Survey, Both Covered¶

Version history and restore both work the same way for a Classic Survey and for the section-based Advanced Survey (Stimulus, Pairwise Comparison, Sequence Flow, and First-Click Test sections included) - there's no difference in what's protected between the two survey types.

FAQ¶

Does this save every single keystroke?
No - versions are created for meaningful, completed changes (a question saved, a section updated), not continuously as you type. The builder's save-status indicator shows you when a change has actually been saved.

Can I turn off autosave?
No - it's always on, as a safety net rather than an optional feature. It doesn't publish anything or affect respondents; it only protects your own in-progress draft.

Does restoring an old version affect survey responses that have already come in?
Version history only exists for a draft survey - it's wiped the moment a survey publishes, specifically because draft-state restoring and real respondent data shouldn't ever be able to collide. See Restoring a Previous Version of Your Survey for the mechanics of what restoring actually changes.

Is there a limit to how often I can save?
No practical limit on manual saves. Automatic background saves are lightly rate-limited so rapid, repeated autosave activity doesn't flood your version history with near-duplicate entries - a deliberate edit you make and explicitly save is never held back by this.

Ready to look through your own history? See Restoring a Previous Version of Your Survey for the step-by-step.