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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

Reply
9 replies

Nov 10, 2022 6:06 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.

Nov 10, 2022 9:25 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. 👍

Please turn off auto save!

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