Want to highlight a helpful answer? Upvote!
Did someone help you, or did an answer or User Tip resolve your issue? Upvote by selecting the upvote arrow. Your feedback helps others! Learn more about when to upvote >
Did someone help you, or did an answer or User Tip resolve your issue? Upvote by selecting the upvote arrow. Your feedback helps others! Learn more about when to upvote >
Can the latest "version" of a Pages document be determined and all the other "versions" deleted? If so, how does one do that, please?
MacBook Pro 15" Aluminum, Mac OS X (10.6.5), 2.53 GHz Intel Core i5, 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
Jay,
The latest Version of a document is the one that you will capture if you use: File > Duplicate, File > Save. If you then send the original file to the trash, the only trace of the versions of that document will be in the trash and in your backups.
If you run the OnyX maintenance scripts, you can choose to delete the Versions history without the little dance I described above, but I can't think of a good reason to do that, since you will be killing the versions data for every document on your system. Too big a risk in my mind, because you never know when you might want to go back. At the very least, do a comprehensive backup before doing something like that.
Jerry
If there are multiple versions of the same titled document, however, how does one know the one opened and about to be duplicated, is the latest one? It seems each time a document is used, a new version of it is created, and yet the title remains the same, doesn't it? Thank you for this help.
Jay
Jay,
If you have multiple documents with the same filename, which is only possible if they are in different folders, you can look at the "last opened" date in Finder to see which was the last to be edited, but that's no guarentee that you have found the one with the content that you want. I thought you were referring to the Versions feature of Lion and Mountain Lion that allows you to revert a single document to an earlier state of editing in that same document. If you have a mess of ambiguous files you are just going to have to go through them and make careful comparisons to determine which is most complete.
Jerry
Hi Jerry,
Thank you for helping me, here. Once the "last opened" file is determined to be the one worth keeping, comparing all previous versions with this one, how does one then go about deleting the previous "versions?" The problem is that, when I do a search in Finder for a file, under Lion there are so many versions of the same file, it's confusing and extraoridinarily time consuming to figure out which is the one to open.
I mourn the earlier versions of the OS where this was not an issue.
Jay
Jay,
What you describe is the longstanding "Back Up Previous Version When Saving" preference in Pages > Preferences. Using that feature is a belt and suspenders approach now that we have Lion and Mountain Lion, but I see that you are still using SL, according to your profile. I didn't notice that in my first reply to you. I apologize for not seeing that sooner since I must have confused you. There is no easy way to delete the backup files except to manually weed them out in Finder, unless you are fluent in Automator script writing.
Jerry
If all of these "versions" are in a single folder you might try viewing the folder in List view & sorting on last modified. You could then select all but the latest & delete them.
Peggy,
All of the versions of the same-named Pages file are in various and sundry folders, created by the machine and not by me. I think I may need to have an Apple employee explain what's happening. Thank you.
Hi Jerry,
What do you mean by SL?
I think I may need to have an Apple employee look and tell me what is happening and how to solve this perplexing problem. Thank you.
SL = Snow Leopard which was in your original post.
Peter
Your profile has to be updates as the Snow Leopard you stat you have in your profile doesn't create "versions"
Pages and "Versions" of a Document
