Is there way to recover older version of corrupted Numbers file

Question

Is there way to recover older version of corrupted Numbers file

I do know that older versions of the file exist (I can see them in .DocumentRevisions-V100), but last version is corrupted. As a result I can not open it in Numbers and use versioning feature to restore older version.

I wonder if there is any way to access older versions of document without help of application which created the document?

Or maybe it is possible to make Numbers to go into "View old versions" mode upon opening documnt?

Or maybe there is way to force Numbers to open corrupted file (ignoring errors)?

Your help/suggestions will be higly appreciated

Cheers,

Andrei

Posted on Feb 28, 2014 3:14 AM

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Answer 1

Jeff Shenk

Level 4

3,005 points

Feb 28, 2014 4:39 AM in response to Andrei Tchijov

Two and a half years ago, in this discussion, Yvan Koenig provided a set of AppleScripts to recover previous versions of a corrupted document from the file that you found.

Since two newer versions of the operating system and a different version of the iWork applications, with two different new versions of the file format have come out since then, and you haven't mentioned what versions you are using, I don't know if those scripts could help in your case or not. At least at some point in the past, it was possible.

I haven't ever tried the scripts myself, and I haven't read them well enough to guess how hard it might be to update them, but maybe that link will help. It looks to me like it would be far easier to recover from a backup of the file than that versions file, and, of course, an important file will have several backups.

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Answer 2

Feb 28, 2014 4:41 AM in response to Jeff Shenk

Brilliant! This does look promising. Will try it over weekend and will post results here.

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Answer 3

Feb 28, 2014 5:22 AM in response to Andrei Tchijov

Did you try recovering from a Time Machine (or other) backup? Off a removable drive, email or other sharing?

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Answer 4

Mar 1, 2014 1:31 AM in response to Andrei Tchijov

After digging some more (and looking through Yvan Koenig's scripts - which unfortunatelly do not work anymore because folder structure changed little bit) I have come up with trivial solution

all u need to do is following:

sudo cp -R .DocumentRevisions-V100 ~/DocumentRevisions-Copy
sudo chmod -R 777 ~/DocumentRevisions-Copy
open ~/DocumentRevisions-Copy/AllUIDs

this will start Finder. You will see number of folders, dig into them untill u start seeing files like 6925664B-E862-4347-8B67-7B9AFAC80EC4.numbers or BD134FF8-6825-49AC-8C22-0A789AFB5F36.pages. These files are older versions of your documents. Just open them one by one, until you found the version u looking for.

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Answer 5

Dec 8, 2015 4:38 AM in response to Andrei Tchijov

Hi Andrei

This was very helpful, to a certain extent! I know know how to access corrupted iWork files.

However, the numbers document which I have that won't open was recovered from a crashed drive. It seems like the DocumentRevisions file is specific to the disk on which the file resides, hence I could not find he document revisions on my main disk. Is that correct?

Thanks, Paul

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