Long-running and often-saved documents can accumulate garbage, many saved versions, and could cause problems with Core Spotlight. Here’s how to freshen them up again.
Revisionist
My scratch writing file turned out to have a total of 3,702 versions saved in the macOS database. Archiving them all required changes to Versatility, in this new version.
Spotlight can’t index the contents of document versions to make them searchable. How you can change that and save having to browse those versions when you need to recover old content.
Version support built into macOS doesn’t preserve versions as well as it could. Here’s how to use Versatility to ensure you don’t lose versions in iCloud, moving a file, or backing up.
A summary of iCloud Drive syncing of attributes, data, extended attributes, document versions (complex), Spotlight index content, and QuickLook previews.
How to create a new file with a creation date 4 months ago and versions dating back to 3 months before that Mac even existed. All without changing any clocks.
How you can easily move saved versions with a file wherever you want, so preserving those versions, and how faithfully versions are created. Demonstrated with a file of 230 versions.
At the top level of every volume use for normal file storage is a hidden folder containing its version database. Here are details of how it works, and how to solve its problems and get the best from it. Even if you don’t want to use versions.
Without you saving any changes made to a document, Preview saves versions in the macOS versioning system that could prove a great help. Here’s how to use it.
Annotations are complicated. If you’re not careful, hidden annotations can be left in documents and cause embarrassment. And how to recover a PDF that Preview has mutilated.
The Eclectic Light Company 