Hibernate, save the previous state of an object

Question

Is there any generally accepted, proven-to-work way using hibernate, that keeps a history of an entitys changes in the database?

We need to keep track of quite some

Answer 1

There is an automatic versioning and auditing project developed by JBoss: envers. I can recommend using this, I've implemented auditing by hand before and that can get really messy when you start approaching more complex usecases.