History and Undo

Every applied organize/folders operation is recorded.

sift history

lists past operations, each with an id (hist-...).

Reversing an operation

sift undo hist-<operation-id>

What undo checks before restoring

Undo is intentionally defensive. Before restoring a single file, Sift verifies that:

• the original path is still free;
• the moved destination still exists;
• the destination is still a regular file;
• the destination has not become a symlink;
• the destination has not become a directory.

If the live filesystem no longer matches those assumptions — something else moved into the original spot, or the file at the destination was itself replaced — Sift refuses that specific restore rather than risking an unsafe overwrite. This is checked per-file, so a partially-safe undo still restores everything it can.

What undo does not cover

• Trash actions are not restored by sift undo. Clean and content-aware duplicate handling (see Rules) send files to the operating system trash — recovery for those is the OS trash’s job, not Sift’s.
• Undo reverses a specific recorded operation, not an arbitrary point in time. There’s no “undo everything since yesterday.”

Next

Explainability covers sift explain, which answers “why” for a decision before or after the fact — undo answers “can this be safely reversed” for one that already happened.