Introduced in OS X 10.7 Lion in 2011, this feature has undergone considerable change. Although it stored versions in iCloud Drive at one time, it doesn’t now.
iCloud Drive
How one of the serious bugs in macOS Sonoma 14.4 came about, why it was so serious, and how Apple released a fix in 7 days of it being reported.
Convert a document into a folder containing all its saved versions, and unarchive that folder back into a document with all those saved versions. All using drag-and-drop.
How to reproduce this serious bug in Sonoma 14.4, and how to archive all the versions of a file or document so they can’t get destroyed.
Do you use saved versions in documents? If a file is evicted by you or macOS, then all saved versions will now be removed, and lost forever. How to work around this serious bug.
Step by step through moving to iCloud Drive, eviction to a dataless file, materialisation of local data, editing and syncing with iCloud Drive.
Ever been tempted to turn on this feature, or maybe you use it already? Do you know how it works, and whether it preserves your files fully?
It lets you evict files so their data is only held in iCloud Drive, freeing up local space. But would to get into storage debt as a results?
How local files retain their extended attributes and versions when moved to iCloud Drive, but they’re not available to other Macs. Sparse files and storage economy as well.
Further insights into how iCloud Drive works using a folder of 20 small files. These reveal system limits including chunk size and throttling.