Speed up your OS... turn Autosave & Versions off globally

I went through a similar experience last year, Ron, when I thought I'd found a way to defeat Versions (the now well-known 'delete/lock the DocumentRevisions-V100 folder' idea, which I think I was one of the first to discover or at least post about on here), only to realise that Lion was not so easily tamed, and indeed doing so only causes OS X to recreate the folder and mark the old folder as bad if you try to lock it or change it in anyway.

I think you've done us all a service by following this through. We've all learned a bit more about this - if only not to do it.

What really stinks is that the restored Save As doesn't actually work with TextEdit, when used without the Terminal command.

1) Create a new document, add any text as a test and save the file.

2) Open the document again and add some text, then do a Save As to a new name and close both documents.

Now, the way Save As is supposed to work, only the new document should contain the changes. But no! Autosave saves the original document with those changes, too. Even with the option on in the System Preferences to ask to save changes.

I have to believe that's a bug, but you can't be sure with Apple's heel digging stance of "Like it or, well, like it.", on this function.

softwater wrote:

I suspect this command just stops apps from writing to the required folder. You're going to get a lot of error messages saying something like 'you don't have permissions to write to the folder that xxx is in' if you do that.

Not recommended.

The terminal command posted by the OP sets a boolean switch that disables the autosave feature. It has nothing to do with file or folder permissions.

RonL wrote:

The developer of TinkerTool System, Marcel Bresink, whom I greatly respect... has replied to my question by stating that currrently "...disabling this feature can cause subtle problems both with program logic and program behavior. In the worst case, this can lead to serious data loss. For this reason, it is out of the question to disable the autosave-in-place function."

That may also be true for other apps that were written specifically to use the autosave feature, but I would consider that a design issue with the apps in that there is no error handling to guard against the possiblity of data loss in the event that a user disables it in order to improve OS performance as you did.

capaho wrote:

The terminal command posted by the OP sets a boolean switch that disables the autosave feature. It has nothing to do with file or folder permissions.

No, it doesn't. It may be a boolean switch, but it doesn't disable Autosave. There is no such command.

And you're the second person to misinterpret my earlier post. 😕

Look at the screenshot that I posted showing the error message.

Here's a very nice alternative to Preview:

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/19978/xee

I've been testing a bunch of image viewers and I liked this one the best. By far the easiest and most intuitive to use. Of the file formats I tested, it can open .tif, .jpg, and .psd. It even opened a Nikon RAW image from a D800. CMYK, RGB or Grayscale supported. No .eps or .pdf support, but then, neither does Preview.

Here's some of the others I looked at if you want to try them.

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/10355/viewit

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/18735/phoenix-slides/

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/15142/ffview/

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/15142/ffview/

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/24966/sequential/

File Viewer in the App Store.

No help here to those who do use Preview to edit images, but if you want strictly a viewer with no worries that it will save a file against your wishes, one of these will do. As far as I'm concerned, Preview can, and will, go in the Trash.

RonL:

Congratulations, you are one of a long list who thinks they discover a cool tweak to the OS but end up opening a proverbial can of worms😁 Now just imagine programming these blasted machines...

One thing you do learn after a while is that the consumers demand a perfectly functioning OS and get pretty irate when they're disappointed. Programmers on the other hand can't possibly test all scenarios, so there are always gonna be bugs (oh the joy). But just try to explain that necessity to consumers, they don't get it.

So what you have stumbled into is the classic programmer's dilemma, and welcome to it.

So what you have stumbled into is the classic programmer's dilemma

Except there is no dilemma, other than Apple's staunch refusal to give users the option to turn Autosave on or off in their apps. Every programmer has that choice. Look at Open Office, Graphic Converter and many others where it's a simple option choice. Adobe flat out refused to incorporate it even in CS6.

Neither Lion or Mountain Lion causes any app to suddenly use Autosave/Versions. It has to be written to use those routines. The exception of course is anything from Apple you apply the latest updates to, or were written to only work that way (can you say FCP X?). But again, that's not the OS itself forcing those changes, it's Apple refusing to give you a choice.

Yes, it unfortunately creates more problems than it solves. But I've fixed my two issues; TexEdit and Preview. Both of them get deleted and replaced by an older version, and a free alternative.