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.
Versatility
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.
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.
Wrangle Unicode normalisation, discover all the app extensions in your Mac, browse the log with nanosecond times, and preserve documents versions when moving them.
Although introduced in the same year, versioning and iCloud Drive aren’t integrated. This explains how they work, and how you can transfer versions through iCloud Drive.
The rules for preserving document versions are based on their being associated with the document’s inode number, and on the same volume. Here are the details and a way to preserve them whatever.
The Eclectic Light Company 