Persist old ActiveRecord model attributes

Question

I have a model called Client with 3 attributes: name, phone and email. At the beginin, I have an instane of Client with some values: Mark, +54261334455 and fake@client.com. Then I change these values to: Peter, +54261444444, another@mail.com but I need to persist the old values. How can I do this?

My options:

1. create old_attr columns: name, phone, email, old_name, old_phone and old_email. I think this is an ugly solution...
2. Use serialize to persist old data having an extra fiel only: name, phone, email and data. I think this is not a good idea since y need to manipulate old data many times.
3. create 2 instances of Client. One with old data an other with new data adding an extra field to Client model to relate these objects. I think this is the better solution but I will need to add to much logic due split "one client" in two

better ideas to do this?

Answer 1

It may be an overkill in your situation but there are some great ActiveRecord versioning tools. It will let you keep track on changes done to a specific record and even reset values to former versions.

One of the best solutions I know of is paper_trail