How to see what changed in Airtable, across a whole base

What Airtable gives you

• Record revision history. Expand any record to see its earlier values and who changed them. It's the best tool Airtable has for “who changed this?”, and it's kept for 2 weeks on Free, 1 year on Team, 2 years on Business and 3 years on Enterprise Scale.
• Last modified time and last modified by fields. Add them to a table and you can sort or filter by recent edits.
• Trash. What was deleted in the last 7 days.
• Audit logs on Enterprise. Admin-level activity for the largest plans, with a broader audit log announced for “the coming months” in October 2026.

What it doesn't give you

• One list of everything that changed yesterday, last week or since a teammate's import, across all tables.
• Deleted records after 7 days. Once the trash empties, the record and its history are gone from view.
• An export. Revision history can't be downloaded, and there's no API for it.
• A heads-up. Nothing tells you that an automation overwrote a column overnight or that half a table vanished.

Do-it-yourself ways to track changes

1. A “changed recently” view (edits only)

Add a Last modified time field to each table and create a view filtered to “is within the past 1 day”. It shows which records were edited, not what changed, and it can't show deleted records, because they're no longer in the table.

2. An automation that writes a log (edits only)

An automation triggered “when a record is updated” can copy the new values and a timestamp into a Log table. The trigger doesn't hand you the previous value, so “before” means looking at the previous log entry. It uses automation runs, needs setting up per table, and deletions don't trigger it.

3. A synced copy that keeps deleted rows

A trick from the Airtable community: sync each table into a separate base and, if your sync settings allow it, keep records that are deleted from the source. Those leftover rows then show what was deleted. It's fiddly to set up for every table, and it only keeps the latest values.

The complete picture: compare daily copies

The only way to see every change, deletions included, is to keep a full copy of the base each day and compare it with the day before. That comparison gives you, per table: records added, records deleted (with all the values they had), and for every edited record, each field's old and new value. Keep those copies for months and you can also search what a record said three weeks ago, even if it was deleted since.

One limitation is worth knowing: a daily comparison shows what changed between two mornings, not who changed it or how many edits happened in between. For “who”, Airtable's own record history is still the place to look, and having the record's name and the date narrows the search to seconds.

You can click through a month of these comparisons on a sample base, including the morning 15 rows disappeared, without signing up.

Questions

Sources, checked October 15, 2026: Airtable: record revision history · Airtable: trash · Airtable: Back to bases (Oct 2026). Nightclerk is not affiliated with Airtable. Compare backup options.