---
title: "Time travel: viewing your structure's history"
description: "Time travel replays your organisation's structural history so you can see the chart exactly as it was on any past date, from a read-only timeline of every circle and role change."
category: structure-governance
section: chart-and-circles
type: Reference
lastUpdated: 2026-09-01
locale: en
canonical: https://support.talkspirit.com/en/structure-governance/time-travel
---

# Time travel: viewing your structure's history


Time travel shows your organisation chart **as it was at any point in the past**. It is a read-only view inside the Structure module: you pick a date on a timeline and the chart redraws to the circles, roles and positions that existed then. Nothing you do here changes the live structure.

**In summary:** open **Timetravel** from the Structure navigation, drag the history scrubber to a past date (or pick a change from the timeline), and the chart reconstructs that moment. You can narrow the timeline to a single year, step change by change, play the history back, and export it.

## How the history is built

Every structural change is recorded as an entry in a modification history: creating a circle or a role, moving one, deleting one, restoring one, transforming a role into a circle (or the reverse), and inviting or removing a cross-circle role. Time travel replays those entries up to the date you choose and rebuilds the chart from them, so what you see is the exact shape of the organisation at that moment.

Because the history is a running record of changes, **an entity that has since been deleted still appears on the dates when it existed.** If a circle was created in March and deleted in September, viewing August shows it in place; viewing October shows it gone. Deletions and restorations are themselves recorded, so the timeline is continuous.

![The Timetravel view reconstructing the Alpine Tech chart as it stood in July 2025, with the History panel on the right and the playback scrubber along the bottom.](/images/structure-governance/time-travel/01-timetravel-past-date.png)

## Moving through time

- **Scrubber.** Drag the scrubber along the timeline to move the chart forward or backward in time.
- **Timeline.** The modification history lists each change with its author, date and description (for example *Create circle "Marketing"* or *Move role "Facilitator"*). Select any entry to jump the chart to that moment.
- **Filter by year.** The history panel carries a year selector, set to **All years** by default, so you can narrow a long history to the year a change happened in.
- **Playback and export.** Play the history back as an animation, and export it to share how the structure evolved.

![The History panel with the "All years" selector above a list of changes grouped by year, each labelled with its operation: Create role, Create circle, Delete role, or a grouped "2 changes" entry.](/images/structure-governance/time-travel/02-history-panel-year-filter.png)

## What time travel cannot show

Time travel can only reconstruct what is in the organisation's own change history. Data that was **permanently deleted in a legacy Holaspirit organisation before its migration** to Talkspirit left no entry in that history, so it cannot appear at any past date, even a date before it was removed. This is the one case where an item you remember existing will not show up: it was erased in the old product, not in Talkspirit.

If you need a record of the current structure rather than a past one, export it instead of relying on time travel.

## Next steps

- [Navigating your organisation chart](/en/structure-governance/how-to-navigate-your-chart)
- [Exporting my organisation's data as an administrator](/en/administration-security/export-your-organisations-data-as-an-administrator)
- [What happens when you delete a circle](/en/structure-governance/what-happens-when-deleting-a-circle)