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.
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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.
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.
If you want to work on the same document across different Apple platforms, then the option providing most restrictive access to saved versions is iCloud Drive.
If you use apps like Pages and Numbers, and others using macOS versions, those versions can’t be shared across iCloud. Over 13 years, Apple still hasn’t got that working as you’d expect.
Preserve documents according to how much time or money would be needed to replace them. For work in progress, macOS versioning can be a great help.
It can take many hours for files to be downloaded from iCloud. Apps must be able to cope with that, but how well does macOS?
Its documentation consists almost entirely of how-to recipes. Is there nothing more conceptual so we can understand its apparently random behaviour?
Using local Time Machine backup, iCloud Recovery, and saved versions to recover previous and current versions of files in iCloud Drive, and their limitations.
The Eclectic Light Company 