Understanding Etherpad's Full Data Export capabilities

Unlike offerings from Microsoft, Google and others, Etherpad offers full data portability ensuring no information is compromised even if you move from one Etherpad instance to another.

But my current editor is fine!

Google's offerings don't allow you to use a Google document on anything except Google. And even then all historical data is lost. Even worst Google docs drops Version history performing only a shallow copy on it's "Make a copy" functionality.

Microsoft leverage OneDrive to introduce Version History functionality but alas there is no keystroke-by-keystroke data between edits meaning the majority of edits on a document are lost providing a weak at best level of history. Because OneDrive is an online only entity there is no portability of history.

What does Etherpad do differently?

Etherpad is the only editor which allows complete data portability including historic edits and changes without compromise. This makes Etherpad the most truthful format, editor and therefor document. Etherpad provides plugins to achieve historical comparisons:

• "Who Did What?"
• "What have I missed?"
• "Timeslider Diff"

-- These plugins can be installed after-the-fact and used when required.

Why should I care?

• Discovery - A legal process called Discovery requires that as much information/history is kept about a document.

• Truth - Having the most honest data is important. Knowing who deleted what content from a contract is important.

• Restoration - Etherpad can restore a document back to a single keystroke, not just a saved revision point.

• Your future - If you have been around online for a while, you will remember all things that have come and gone, because of this having a file format that provides all information and provides complete portability is important.

• Computational analysis - If you are a teacher, you are familiar with marking kids work, but as the world and education moves towards more collaborative working it's important to have a platform that can analyze individual students/authors work in real time and provide historical data to see how an author has progressed in their abilities through the life of a document. Etherpad provides tools to enable this:

• "Text Statistics"