Snapshots

A snapshot is a frozen copy of a cube's values at a moment in time. It answers questions an editable model cannot — "what did we submit to the board in March?" and "what has changed since?" — without turning that copy into another cube you have to hide, maintain, and protect from edits. Snapshots are inert by design: they are not cubes, so nothing lists them as a data source, recomputes them, links to them, or lets them be edited.

Open the Snapshots panel from the cube editor.

Freeze

Give the current state a label — "Board submission", "FY26 plan v1" — and Freeze now. A snapshot captures the whole cube: every dimension, every scenario, every cell, exactly as it stands, along with who took it and when. Freezing is available to editors and above.

A snapshot stores values only. Cell comments, cell styles, references, and access rules are not part of it — a restore brings the numbers back, not the commentary around them.

Compare against live

Compare diffs a snapshot against the cube's current values and lists what changed: cells whose value moved, cells filled since the freeze, and cells cleared. If the cube's dimensions have changed since the snapshot was taken — a dimension added or removed — a cell-by-cell comparison is no longer meaningful, and the panel says so instead of showing misleading differences.

Restore

Restore replaces every value in the cube with the snapshot's. It is deliberately safe:

• Before writing anything, XCubes automatically freezes the current state as a new snapshot labelled "Before restore…", so a restore can itself be undone.
• Restore works as long as the cube's dimensions are unchanged. Items that were reordered are handled automatically — a value follows its item, not its position. Items deleted since the freeze are skipped and reported. Items added since the freeze keep their current values rather than being blanked, so a restore after new items were added produces a hybrid; the panel tells you how many items that affected.
• If a dimension was added or removed since the freeze, restore is refused rather than scattering values across the wrong cells.

Restoring is available to editors and above.

Download

CSV downloads a snapshot's values as a file. This is available to everyone, including viewers — and, importantly, it still works for a snapshot whose structure has drifted too far to restore. When a dimension change makes restore impossible, the CSV is the way to get those historical numbers back out.

Retention

XCubes keeps a bounded number of snapshots per cube so a large model's frozen copies do not grow without limit (25 deliberate snapshots per cube by default). When that limit is reached, delete a snapshot to free a slot before taking another — a snapshot you took on purpose is never discarded automatically to make room. The automatic "Before restore" snapshots are separate: only the few most recent are kept and older ones are pruned on their own, so they never crowd out the ones you took deliberately.

Deleting a snapshot is permanent and is recorded in the project audit log; it is restricted to admins and owners.