Understanding document versions

Sometimes people use Internet to get access to the most current information. If this information stales, they visit web sites again to view updated data, This applies to news, weather, stock rate sites. For example, the weather report for yesterday is usually useless.

However, there are cases in which it is still needed to access old information. For example, what to do if you want to read a week-old news site articles? The problem is that site information is already updated and, if you access it, you'll get the news for the current day rather than for the last week. The site publishes only current news and those old news are already removed there. Some sites offer news archives, but not each of them and not each for free. Additionally, you may wish to retrieve a month-old information or for each day of the last month.

To solve this problem Ad Annihilator features document versioning. Each time you visit the same page, Ad Annihilator may remember each page version in its cache. Later you will be able to access any version. For example, if you visit news site every day, you may have a single version per each day and access any version at later time.

With Ad Annihilator you'll deliver yourself from headache of keeping of multiple document versions. Ad Annihilator will act as your personal archivist carefully keeping and sorting the information that you need.

Note that in the previous example, If you don't visit the site at a single day, you'll have no version for that day. This is natural as you cannot retrieve a page offline that is not in the cache.

See How to manage document versions? to know how you may manage document versions with Ad Annihilator.

Understanding of the document versioning in Ad Annihilator

By default Ad Annihilator does not keep versions of browsed documents, and Ad Annihilator cache stores only the most recently visited document versions. We will call this, the most recently visited document version a current, the latest or the last version. The next time when you retrieve the same document from the Internet again, the previous version is lost and it is replaced with the new version that becomes the new current version as it is more recent. The current document versions are shown directly under the host folder in Documents window. For example, on the picture below all documents shown directly under NYTIMES host folder are current versions.

If you instruct Ad Annihilator to make a document version either implicitly or explicitly, it will create a new version. We'll call it a managed or fixed version or simply a version as opposed to current version. Ad Annihilator will never delete or replace fixed versions later. Rather, it will update the current version leaving all fixed versions in place. So after you have made a document version (fixed a version), you may be sure that it will never be deleted automatically. Of course, you always have an ability to delete it manually. On the picture above the third document (The New York Times on the Web) have three fixed versions (in addition to the current version) that are located under it in the tree.

For detailed discussion of versions making and other version-related operations see How to manage document versions?