⏪ Rewind & versions

Undo a period rather than a file, or roll a single file back to an earlier version.

There are two ways to go backwards, and they answer different questions.

Revisions answer "what did this file look like before?" — one file, many saved versions.

Rewind answers "put everything back to how it was at 3pm" — one moment, however many files were touched since.

🕰️ Revisions, for one file

pcloud list-revisions /Documents/report.pdf

   98765        latest    3.2 MB       14 May 2026 09:12
   91234                  3.1 MB       06 May 2026 18:40

The newest is marked latest and the list is ordered by revision id — pCloud promises no order of its own, and taking whichever arrived first rolls back further than you asked for.

Roll the file back in place:

pcloud revert-revision /Documents/report.pdf 91234

Both commands take a path or an id, so nothing needs looking up first.

⏪ Rewind, for a moment in time

pcloud rewind --to "2026-07-30 20:30"

This plans an undo of everything since that moment and prints it without touching anything:

Rewinding to 30/07/2026, 20:30:00
Scanned 634 events.

Restore from trash (12):
  /Documents/quarterly.pdf
  ...

Revert to an earlier version (41):
  /Reports/summary.tsv
  ...

This was a dry run. Re-run with --apply to perform it.

Narrow it to part of your drive:

pcloud rewind --to "2026-07-30 20:30" --path /Documents

And when the plan looks right:

pcloud rewind --to "2026-07-30 20:30" --apply

What it undoes, and what it will not

Event	Undone by	Why
A file was deleted	restoring it from trash	The copy is still there
A file was edited	reverting to the newest revision from before the cutoff	Earlier versions are retained
A file was created	nothing — reported only	The only way to undo a creation is to delete real data, which is indistinguishable from the accident being repaired

That asymmetry is deliberate. A rewind that quietly removed files would be the same shape as the mistake you are trying to fix.

Why this is reconstructed rather than called

pCloud's web app has a Rewind feature, but no public API behind it — listrewindevents returns a 404 under every spelling, which is why pcloud doctor lists it under "Not offered by pCloud".

What the API does expose are the three pieces Rewind is built from: the change log says what happened and when, the trash holds deletions that have not been purged, and revisions hold prior versions of modified files. Replaying the change log backwards over those two recovery paths reaches the same outcome.

One consequence worth knowing: it reaches only as far back as the trash and the revision history do. If the window you ask for extends past the most recent 5,000 events, it refuses rather than silently undoing part of it.

In the browser

The Rewind tab folds a day's events on one file into a single row, so a file saved every few minutes is one line with a count rather than forty. → opens a run into its individual saves.

Each row offers both scales: recover that one file, or rewind the whole account to just before that run began.