Q: iCloud drive version history / restore?

All Apple has publicly published about iCloud Drive is this FAQ:   iCloud Drive FAQ http://support.apple.com/kb/HT201104

It does not mention versioning.

But versioning is a capability of the applications, that support it, not of the drive the documents are stored on. I see no reason, why it should not work on the iCloud drive for Mac documents.

I see several reasons why it does not work...

In a cloud environment you access the files from several different locations (computer, mobile, ipad) and each might run a different program to access the file.

Take simple text files. There are virtually millions of applications to access text files, and to require of each of them to have versioning capabilities is a bit of a tall order.

With versioning in the drive (like for instance with Dropbox) you don't have to worry about making - and saving - changes you might later regret. Just hop into the version history on dropbox.com and look up the version you've now edited away.

As far as I can see iCloud at least has the ability to recover deleted files.

For now it seems the only way to get back to older versions is to have TimeMachine activated on your computer (and if you don't have it activated - no versioning in most apps)... and then pray you don't make too many changes on your iPad... or if you have several machines, hope you can find the right machine with the right version.

Oh, and hope your house doesn't burn down in the midst of all this... or your laptop gets stolen... there is a reason why people choose the integrity risks with cloud storage so it's a very silly proposition from Apple to then require local backups.

Hmmm nope, not exactly working the way I'd like it to....

Seriously. What joke. I don't get the talk of Apple "not doing it first, but doing it best." Seems more like "do it late, do it half-assed, and require all your customers to upgrade their hardware to do it at all."