Chronic catastrophic data loss with Lion & servers

Auto-save and versions, when combined with multiple users and a server environment virtually guarantees catastrophic data loss.

Here's how you replicate it.

(1) Place a photo on a server.

For us, this is where we recommend people keep important files. Their desktop may be backed up with time machine, but the server is RAID 6 with hot spares, and on top of that is backed up every night. Much, much safer.

(2) Open that photo in preview. Crop it so that you can print it. Close preview. Notice it didn't ask you if you wanted to save?

(3) Open that file again. It's still cropped. The original? Gone. Choose "Revert to Saved" from the file menu. Notice the large number of empty windows on the right? Yup, you can't get back to the prior version, even though you never saved.

Now, as a network administrator, imagine the consequences of this for your network. Users accessing shared files and making changes they need, but not saving them because they don't need to be saved. Yup, their version is now THE definitive version for the entire network.

The ability to do non-destructive edits is something that computer users have been doing since, well, the dawn of computing more or less. Lion removes this. Now, add on top of that user mistakes in a network environment. User accidentally deletes all the text from a 24 page document. They don't know what to do so they close the app. Unless the backup has run since that 24 page document was created, it's gone. Forever. And ever. Amen.

Go to backups you say? What if the document isn't accessed for six months from when the user accidentally wiped it out. Hope your backup server is petabyte big, because otherwise that data is gone.

This is a huge, huge problem.

Joel