Google Doc: how to preserve edit history when access is lost

March 22, 2018 6:13 PM

Say you were collaborating with someone in a Google doc. It was on their (corporate) instance of Google Drive. Assume that you will imminently lose access to the document. How can you preserve the edit history to show evidence of your work? Are screenshots the only way?
posted by rednikki to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Unless you can copy the doc to your drive, screenshots are a pretty decent bet. Exporting to some locally-retainable format is also a good bet (pdf, for example). If all else fails, maybe printing the document would work?
posted by =d.b= at 8:02 PM on March 22, 2018

Response by poster: Thanks! To clarify: what I need is actually the edit history itself (that logs who made what changes).
posted by rednikki at 8:23 PM on March 22, 2018

I seem to recall that when I saved a copy in my own Google Drive of a document I'd been collaborating on, the existing edit history came along with it. Even if I'm recalling wrong, that's a quick thing to check.
posted by flabdablet at 10:08 PM on March 22, 2018

Response by poster: Thanks! Unfortunately, no - saving a copy is one of the "tricks" for getting rid of the edit history so you can present someone with a clean document.
posted by rednikki at 10:46 PM on March 22, 2018

Best answer: AuthorViz doesn't display the full edit history, but it does provide proof of who wrote what that you could print out.
posted by Paragon at 2:01 AM on March 23, 2018