A versioned records management system that uses a restart era in order to promote rapid recovery. A persistent store includes a plurality of items that are each marked with a restart era. Any item that was created in the current restart era is marked with the current restart era. The persistent store also includes a first subset of the items comprising a plurality of records. At least one record includes multiple corresponding versions. The persistent store also includes a second subset of the items comprising a collection of objects that conform to an object model that is used to operate upon the plurality of records via the object collection. The versioned records management system recovers from a crash by promoting an item in the persistent store to the current restart era, in parallel with normal operation of the versioned records management system.