Rolling Back To Previous Versions Of Files On Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's talk about one of the most underused features of macOS, Document Version. 

This feature has been around in apps like Pages, Numbers, and Keynote for years yet most Mac users don't know about it. It can really save you in a lot of situations. So, let's start here in Pages and I'm going to just create a blank Pages document. Let's go ahead and type a sample paragraph here. Call it Paragraph 1 and put some sample text there. Now at this point it is probably a good idea to Save the document. Use File, Save and I'm going to save this as a file just as a folder in my Home Folder. Now I'm going to go and I'm going to add Paragraph 2. Now that I'm done this paragraph I'm going to Save it as well just using a quick Command S for File, Save. Let me do the same thing with a 3rd paragraph and a 4th paragraph and another Save and a 5th paragraph. Then I'll Save again. So I'm just simulating working say on a book where each one of these is maybe pages and pages of text. 

Now a typical thing you may do when writing is you may see something and say, you know what I've changed my mind I don't want that and get rid of paragraph 3 there and Save and then actually go one and maybe save another paragraph. Now this is all fine. But what happens when later on you want to go back and get paragraph 3 that you deleted. Well, there is a way to do that. Go into the File Menu and you look to Revert To you'll see Browse all Versions. Select that and you'll enter this special interface. It looks a lot like the Time Machine Interface. It's got a Timeline here on the right, got your document in its current stage here on the left, and here it's got this stack of previous versions of the document. You can use the arrows here or the Timeline to go back to a previous version. So I go back to this version here and I can see it's got Paragraph 3 in it. I can click Restore to restore it to that version of the file, or I can click Done if I decide I changed my mind and just want to stick with the current version of the document. 

So as you go and make changes to your document every time you Save or Close the document it is going to save a new version in this database. It's not saving complete copies of the file. It is just remembering what was changed and putting that in a special place on your drive, not increasing the size of the file at all. Well, you might say I can do the same thing with Undo, and you can. It's an important tool. In fact if I use Command Z to Undo I can undo all the way back to when I had paragraph 3 and I can even select and copy it and then use Shift Command Z, which is Edit and Redo, and I can go back to the current version, like that, and then with Paragraph 3 now in the Clipboard I can Paste it in. So Undo can work in some situations but it is kind of risky to use. If you change something in the middle of that sequence of Undo and Redo you can loose everything that you wanted to redo. Plus it doesn't work if you Close the document and reopen it. That clears the Undo buffer. 

But this feature, which Apple originally called Versions when it first came out, that has the ability to Restore from previous versions even after you've closed and opened the document. You've got the ability to go back and grab something without reverting to it. There's actually three possible ways to do it. One is to go to Revert To. Browse All Versions and then go back to the version that you want, like the one here with paragraph 3 in it, and then if you click on the document it will enlarge. That allows you to see it and maybe scroll through it too to see if it is the one you want and then you click Restore. But you can also select text in here and Copy. Then just click Done to submit the entire interface. Now you've got paragraph 3 in the Clipboard and can Paste it in. Another thing you can do is to go to Revert To, Browse All Versions, go back to the Version that has what you wanted and hold the Option Key down. When you do Restore changes to Restore A Copy. Click that and now you've got two copies of the document open. The one you're working on and this other one here that is like a new document. So you could Copy & Paste or simply decide you want to keep this one, maybe even Copy & Paste from the current version to the restored one. Whatever gets you to the state that you really want to be in. 

There's a third way to Restore an old piece without removing all the new stuff. It is handy to know because it is easy to end up making a mistake and deleting the new stuff. You go to Revert To, Browse All Versions. Then you go back to the version that has the thing that you are missing. So Paragraph 3. Hit Restore and now you've got Paragraph 3 back but maybe you've lost the new stuff you've typed since that previous version. Well the handy thing is that if you go to Revert To now this new version here that restored the old one is actually saved as the latest revision. But you can go back to the previous revision as well. So it's never rolling things back. It's actually grabbing an old version and making that the new version. But the previous one is still there. 

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Now a handy thing to know is that if you Save and Close the document now if you go to make changes, I'll get rid of paragraph 2, and you Save. If you go to File, Revert To notice that in addition to Browse All Versions you've got Last Opened here as well. So that only happens if you've created the document, saved it, and at some point you closed it and reopened it, which we didn't do originally. But now we can rollback to that last opened version and it doesn't even have to enter that special Time Machine-like interface. 

Now there is a slight difference in how this works if you've saved the file to iCloud Drive, which is probably where you're going to be saving it. So I'll just save it here at the top level of iCloud Drive Documents. I'll add the other paragraphs, one-by-one, saving after each one. So this looks identical to what we've been doing except now this is actually saved in iCloud Drive instead of locally. Now when you go to Revert To and Browse All Versions it seems to work the same. But sometimes when you go back you get this screen here. When you saved the document in iCloud Drive the database of the changes that you've made, that is save in iCloud, not on your local drive. So sometimes you run into this screen and you've got to click here and load that version. It's just one extra step that you sometimes have to use. The advantage of doing it that way if you move to another machine and you go to access the revision you'll have them. So it is saving these revisions across iCloud for you to access anywhere. 

Which brings me to some pitfalls that you should know about. This only works if you saved the file to your Mac's local drive. It is Mac format and if you save to iCloud Drive. But if you save it to a drive that is not Mac Format or you save it to some other Cloud Service like Google or Microsoft, then it is not going to have this versioning. This is true if you duplicate the document as well. It becomes detached from all of that version data. So if you're in the old habit of duplicating your documents as you work on it so you have all versions you can certainly still do that if you want. Just make sure you're always working on that one current document and the duplicates are the ones being archived, not used to continue writing. 

Now this works in a ton of different apps, in particular Apple's apps. So in addition to Pages. Here in Numbers we can add something to a cell in a new document here and we can now Save it here, put something else in the cell, Save, something else in a cell, Save and I can go to File, Revert To, Browse All Versions and access past versions of this Numbers document. So this works in Pages, Numbers, Keynote. It works in TextEdit. It works in Preview say if you're marking things up in stages and saving. It works in third party apps like Editor, for instance. It even works in Pixelmator Pro. Here I am in Pixelmator Pro. I'll create something here. I will save this document here like that. I'll move this Save. Move this Save. Move this Save. I can go to File, Revert To and I can go back in time to all these previous versions. Look for this in any app where there is a document file involved. Where you're creating a document, saving it as a file, and versions can then be saved. Apple has got it all over the place but third party app developers have this available to them as well so they can build that into their apps. 

I'm always asked about Microsoft Word. Of course Microsoft is doing their own thing when it comes to software development. They're not necessarily using Apple's tools like this. But Word does have this and have their own version of it. It only works if you Save the File to Microsoft's file system. It doesn't work if you save it locally to your Mac or to iCloud. If it doesn't have this you still have another option. That's Time Machine. As long as you're doing a Time Machine backup you can use Time Machine to go back in time to get previous versions of any kind of file at all. Now it's not going to be every time you save. It is going to be how often you do the backup. Like if it is every hour you can go back and grab the file from the last hour, or yesterday, or the day before to go back to a previous version and grab something for it or just revert to that version. 

But this Restore versions feature in apps like Pages is much easier to use, has every version that you save, and can really save you as long as you know about and know how to use it. Give it a try right now so you see how it works so you know how to use it before you need it. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.