Yes, but GP wanted something that would just keep all deleted text.

Sort of, anytime you delete something, that text gets stored somewhere in case, 2 hours later, you realised you wanted it.

Yes, vim’s “set undofile” will create a persistent undo file that stores all changes to the file indefinitely. You can undo changes made months ago over reboots. If you move the undo file between machines, you can undo on different computers.

Undoing a change from 2 hours ago in the same editing session is the trivial use case for undofile.

But undoing is not what the original commenter wanted.

When set undofile is combined with :earlier and :later being used in place of undo and redo I think vim behaves as the author describes.