If you use document versions in macOS, from El Capitan to High Sierra, you can now ensure those versions move with their documents wherever they go – onto an external drive, even a USB memory stick or thumb drive in FAT format, onto another system via iCloud Drive, onto networked storage (NAS), even copied across to Windows, or sent via email.

This is now quick and simple using my new DeepTools.

DeepTools consists of three small utilities, which accept files and folders via drag and drop, or by opening them using the File menu.

DeepCopy is the tool of choice when you want to make a duplicate or copy of a document with all its versions, to the same volume, or to any other volume in HFS+ or APFS format. Simply drop the document onto the app’s icon, and save the deep copy to its destination. Done.

If you want unlimited portability, use DeepArchive to convert the document and all its versions into a folder containing each version in order. If you want to, you can edit out unwanted versions from that folder. When you’re moving the document to another Mac, on the destination system, convert the archive folder back into versions using DeepUnarchive.

Archive folders just contain a numbered sequence of files, each of them one of the stored versions. You can move these across to other systems, such as Linux/Unix or Windows; although you may not have software there which can assemble them in the same way that your Mac can, you still have access to each version of the document, and can copy and paste in content from older versions, for example.

You can Zip archive folders up to save space and make them easier to move around. You can put them onto any cloud storage system. You can even send them as email attachments. If the recipient is running macOS and has DeepUnarchive, they can readily reconstitute the document complete with all its versions.

The first beta-release of DeepTools is available from here: deeptools10b1
and from Downloads above.

These have not yet been tested on El Capitan, and I particularly welcome comments from anyone able to test them there, please.

I have encountered odd issues with drag and drop in High Sierra 10.13.4, but believe that I have fixed this (it appears to be a bug between Xcode support and High Sierra).

I welcome all comments and bug reports, please.