I am pleased to announce, after a long beta period, the first full release of DeepTools, my suite of three tools for document copying and moving while preserving macOS document versions.

These are drag-and-drop utilities which allow you to preserve the version histories of documents, no matter where they go. The tools are:

• DeepCopy, which preserves versions when copying a file. Normally, copies of documents, made by the Finder and by apps, lose their versions; this tool makes copies with their own versions.
• DeepArchive, which converts all the versions of a document stored by macOS into a folder of individual documents, so they can be moved to another Mac via iCloud Drive, on other storage media, or even to another operating system.
• DeepUnarchive, which takes a folder containing versions of a document, such as that produced by DeepArchive, and converts it back into a document with its previous versions stored in the macOS version system.

Their use is simple: to make another complete copy of a document with its versions on the same Mac, on an HFS+ or APFS volume, use DeepCopy. To copy a document to another Mac via iCloud Drive, or on a USB memory stick in ExFAT or similar format, turn the document into an archive folder using DeepArchive, move that folder (compress it as a Zip archive if you wish), and when it’s on the destination system, use DeepUnarchive to turn it back into a regular document with versions.

If you use versions, these are essential tools, and work on El Capitan, Sierra, and High Sierra, with HFS+ and APFS.

DeepTools version 1 is available from here: deeptools10
and from Downloads above.