How can I email a document from iWork without the recipient seeing the intermediate saved versions?

Question

It looks like we don't need to keep different files like on Windows 7:

speech 2012 rev 01.doc
speech 2012 rev 02.doc
speech 2012 rev 03.doc

So on Lion, we can just use "Save a version" and all versions will be there later on to "revert" to any version... The functionality introduced with Lion's "Save a Version" is cool, but what if we want to email somebody but don't want the earlier versions to be sent?

So are all the old version separate files in the hard drive? (then what if I want to clear those versions out to make space?) Or are those version embedded within the document? What if I want to email speech rev final.pages to somebody and don't want to include all the versions then?

Answer 1

The versions are not embedded in the files, but instead get stored elsewhere.

Due to the nature of how Lion stores versions, small files get saved entirely, but larger files can track only the parts of the file that changed in fairly snazzy ways to reduce the chance that some trivial change to a very large file uses more than a trivial amount of version space.

When you mail any file, you don't send the version, just the last saved copy.

When you delete a file, the system checks and cleans out versions so you are generally never going to see a large amount of space tracking files that no longer exist.

If you are curious - this terminal command will tell you the sum total of the tracking and storage on your main drive: sudo du -sm /.DocumentRevisions-V100/

I have yet to see a mac with more than 200 meg of storage here, but post a new question if you ever find a bug or situation where this storage seems out of line. Lots of good information on this is on the site as well as elsewhere:

• Do OS X Lion's Versions and Resume features store the cached data for encrypted .sparsebundle images in a secure way?
• John Siracusa's very nice Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: the Ars Technica review : Versioning Internals