What happened to Save As?

I particularly like the remap addition that reassigns Command+Shift+S back to Save As where it belongs, and has the added bonus of hiding Duplicate in the process.

An even bigger bonus would be if Mountain Lion still accepts Stupidd Looser's Terminal defaults changes to turn autosave/versions off. Then you are truly back to pre Lion silliness. Hard drive space isn't being wasted on versions you don't want, or need; and Save As has its original shortcut.

Dennis Burnham wrote:

Bravo…Mazel Tov…Congratulations and thank you for this solution. How I wish I could serve this up on a silver platter to someone special in France.

I understand you congratulate the crowd here for keeping the pressure on Apple and Apple on getting back to their senses 🙂

Note: I had to disable the Terminal trick from previous page for this to work in Numbers and Preview:

Numbers:

defaults write com.apple.iWork.Numbers ApplePersistence -bool yes

Preview:

defaults write com.apple.Preview ApplePersistence -bool yes

And who knows, maybe next year with Lion Service Pack 2 we will be able to properly turn off Autosave and Versions (I know we can already, kind of, but some functionalities are lost - at least in my case...)

Yeah, I just noticed that you already found out the Terminal trick doesn't work in Mountain Lion. For me, it's not a big deal since the only Apple supplied apps which support Autosave/Versions I even use are Preview and TextEdit.

You can still use SL's version of TextEdit in ML. SL's version of Preview is completely broken and won't even launch. But with ML's new options in the System Preferences to always ask if you want save changes turned on, when you close Preview, one of the choices is now "Revert and Quit (or Exit, can't remember which at the moment)". So you at least have the option to throw out any changes on the fly instead of having to manually revert every image you had open in Preview.

Hello,

I believe these two options are worse than useless and I am going to tell you why.

If you know your crappy autosave app will change your documents you will force yourself to always work on copies (or change software, as I did).

With these options you may have the ILLUSION to have control while it may not be the case.

In fact documents are autosaved and the popup actually asks if you want to revert to the original version.

This is a totally idiot implementation (another one by Apple on this topic) of version control. A safe implementation should NOT touch your file until you actually WANT your changes to be saved.

Imagine this scenario:

1. you use Preview to open the best photo you ever made because you want to prepare a Keynote presentation (let's say the photo is on a shared drive, not supporting versions)

2. you edit your photo (crop, resize or whatever)

3. you copy it and paste it in Keynote and you work on the presentation for some time

4 (hidden). autosave saves your modified photo without your consent, but you know it will ask you if you want to revert back...

5. while you work on Keynote, Preview crashes (it DOES crash occasionally)

6. hours after you complete your presentation, save it and prepare for live pres.

Your photo is gone forever.

You may argue Preview does not crash. Then imagine a thunderstorm cutting the electricity. Same risk.

My advice: AVOID autosave, versions and all the applications that force you to use them.

It's not ideal as is now but it's a very workable compromise. In case of crash you can revert to original with Versions.

I still insist Adobe has the best solution: treats files the "old" way, leaving you full control over saving but also adds option to save an emergency copy in predefined time intervals in case of crash.

A safe implementation should NOT touch your file until you actually WANT your changes to be saved.

No disagreement from me. I'd really like to kill Autosave/Versions completely and forever. Someone at Apple though still seems to think they know better than the person the documents belong to what to do with them.

I've seen enough reports of permanently lost documents caused by Autosave/Versions failing to save them properly, or in such a way that they not only couldn't be opened, but were actually gone!

I'll tolerate it in Preview since I never, ever use it to make any changes. I use it as a viewer only. Though even then, I would bet it's still prepping versions in the background for every file I open.

@raftr

It's not ideal as is now but it's a very workable compromise. In case of crash you can revert to original with Versions.

That's the point: if the volume you are working on supports Versions I'm with you. I often work on network drives and in that case I would lose my original file.

The fact that in some conditions you are safe while in others you are fubar makes a false sense of safety that (IMHO) is much worse than knowing I'm in danger.

Here's also a way (thanks to TJ Luoma at The Unofficial Apple Weblog) to get back the "Save As" in our File menu and have the original keyboard shortcut returned to us as well... without having to hack the OS.

http://www.tuaw.com/2012/07/29/get-save-as-back-on-mountain-lions-file-menu-easi ly-and-without/

Enjoy.

.

.

Sigh. I used to open up a document, make a bunch of changes, and "Save As" a new version. For this type of workflow, because of Autosave and Versions, restoring the "Save As" command is meaningless.

Try this out in TextEdit.

1. Create a new TextEdit document and type the word "Original". Save the document and call it DocumentA

2. Close it and reopen it. Change the word "Original" to "Modified". Save As ... DocumentB. Close it.

3. Reopen both documents. The word "Original" is gone. That is because A was autosaved/versioned while you were working on it. So unless you do a "Save As" before you ever start making changes (which is not what you used to have to do) you will have to revert DocumentA to get your "Oiginal" back.

Essentially you still have to do a "Duplicate and Revert" to preserve the "Original". The new command has given us back nothing.

I had tried something like this when Lion first came out and it performed as described but I don't use the affected apps enough or create enough permanent files with them to have experienced the alleged permissions issues others describe. In any case the setting was undone by the Mountain Lion upgrade and I have not reapplied it.

If a lot of apps start to take "advantage" of autosave/versions I will explore again.

@RonL,

Does this behavior happen when you use your global disable "autosave/versions" Terminal Command AND the SaveAs Menu workaround? Or, with just one of them? (Of course, with the "Ask to Keep changes...." checked)

...Starting to feel like Apple has really mucked this one up!

As already mentioned, the Save As that apple magically invented for Mountain Lion, is actually not the good old Save As, as we know it. Instead we get something uttely useless, that defeats its own purpose by NOT reverting changes in the original document.

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Apple 1976-2011 wrote:

As already mentioned, the Save As that apple magically invented for Moutain Lion, is actually not the good old Save As, as we know it. Instead we get something uttely useless, that defeats its own purpose by NOT reverting changes in the original document. They could probably be sued for false advertising here.

Technically, it is "Save and Duplicate", absolutely pointless and possibly dangerous.

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Thanks for censoring my post, AAPL!

Apple is dead. All hail AAPL.

And, like I mentioned in my censored post, AAPL ought to be sued for false advertising regarding the so-called Save As "feature" in ML.

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