Please turn off auto save!

Question

Level 2

196 points

Please turn off auto save!

I know how you are supposed to do it, but it only partly works. You go to General Prefs and select "ask to keep changes when closing documents", but only partly works.

Say you make a change to a document called "moonshine" and then you Save As and call it "moonshine 2". You then close that document and you have the original and the second one, but go and look at the original called "moonshine" and you will find that it has been overwritten and is now the same as "moonshine 2". No prompt to change it, but you original document is lost.

The work around is to go and open the original, go into the file menu and choose to revert to a previous version and then save it again. A multistep process just to keep the document as it was.

Why does Apple do this? Is there a way to avoid it?

Mac Studio

Posted on Nov 9, 2022 11:54 AM

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Answer 1

MartinR

Level 7

23,439 points

Nov 10, 2022 06:06 AM in response to Barney-15E

Barney-15E wrote:

... Possibly a bug ...

It's not a bug. It's intentional design by Apple. Seven or eight years ago Apple introduced what they called, at the time, "modern document management." (You may recall the furor when "Save As" disappeared from many Apple apps.) That's when Apple introduced this practice.

It was (is) intended to preserve the current state of a document at all times. The problem, and I consider it a huge problem, is exactly what Cartoonguy complained about. It's an overt change from all prior and intuitive practice that can leave the user with undesired edits/changes to a document, especially if they don't know about this "feature." And getting around it requires multiple extra undocumented and little known steps.

Apple eventually backed off and returned "Save As" to most of its app menus. But the underlying, invisible and ongoing save behavior has remained.

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Answer 2

Cartoonguy Author

Level 2

196 points

Nov 9, 2022 04:05 PM in response to Barney-15E

Ah, excellent. That makes sense. I still don't know why Apple can't design this to work in the intuitive way it always has and not overwrite the original without duplicating, but this helps. Thank you.

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Answer 3

Nov 9, 2022 11:46 PM in response to Cartoonguy

Which application specifically? As far as I can tell, this depends on how the application is programmed.

Some may offer you the choice, some will work as you expect, and some save both versions the same (ie. keep the changes in the original file as well as the one you Save As...)

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Answer 4

picas

Level 7

21,003 points

Nov 10, 2022 12:32 AM in response to Cartoonguy

If you edit a file in the Pages app, then Save As, the dialogue box that pops up asks if you want to keep changes to the original document. If you deselect it, the changes won't appear on the other file.

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Answer 5

Cartoonguy Author

Level 2

196 points

Nov 10, 2022 09:25 AM in response to MartinR

Exactly. In my case, I'm using Preview to add some text over a photo, but I don't want the original photo to retain the text, so I "save as" and lo and behold, the original retains the text even though I did not save it and I have the option selected ask to save changes before I close it. Barney's answer is as a helpful workaround. 👍

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Answer 6

Barney-15E

Level 10

121,238 points

Nov 10, 2022 09:33 AM in response to MartinR

I never felt the old way was intuitive at all. Save as what? Maybe a banana?

Or, more intuitive, save as another file format. Overwriting a document intending to later Save As… Oops, I hit Save. Rife with the potential to lose data. Versions, Duplicate all make much better sense.

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Answer 7

Barney-15E

Level 10

121,238 points

Nov 9, 2022 03:11 PM in response to Cartoonguy

Duplicate the document before you change it.

Or, Duplicate after making changes, then revert to the version you want.

At least Versions still works so you can recover what you overwrote.

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Answer 8

Barney-15E

Level 10

121,238 points

Nov 9, 2022 04:18 PM in response to Cartoonguy

Yeah, I don't know why it does that. Possibly a bug, but then Versions seems to work which I wouldn't expect. I thought that disabled Versions, too. Maybe it never did disable Versions.

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Answer 9

Barney-15E

Level 10

121,238 points

Nov 10, 2022 09:49 AM in response to MartinR

The bug was in reference to keeping the changes. If there was a checkbox to revert changes, I missed it, too.

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Please turn off auto save!

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