| Cult of Mac

How to restore a previous version of that Mac document you messed up

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With Time Machine versions, you can recover old versions of Mac documents.
Did you delete an old version of an important Mac document? All is not lost.
Photo: Şahin Sezer Dinçer/Pexels CC

Have you ever ruined an essay by over-editing it? Did you ever mistakenly delete a huge chunk of a report, and not realize it until days later? Maybe you thought you’d saved another copy of that important document, but your Mac seems to have swallowed it. No problem, because your Mac saves versions of your documents as you go, and lets you browse and restore them. And it’s all built in to — yes — Time Machine.

How to recover previous versions of your files on Mac

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Files may be clunky, but it's better than this.
There's no need to keep a zillion different versions of a file on the Mac.
Photo: Phil Roeder/Flickr CC

What happens if you’re working on a document and you realize you screwed it up? Maybe you deleted a few paragraphs without realizing. Or you’ve just been writing a bunch of nonsense for the past half-hour and wish you could go back to where you were before? On the Mac, you can easily do just that. It’s called versions, and it’s automatic.

Using versions, you can easily browse and restore previous versions of any document. Some apps have this built in, so you can do it right there inside the app itself. But the Finder also supports versions, so you can revert to a previous state of almost anything.

How to browse all the auto-saved versions of your Mac documents

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versions twin zebras
Like these twin zebras, the Mac auto-saves versions of your files. Twins!
Photo: Marta Miguel Martínez-Soria/Flickr CC

Did you know that your Mac keeps older versions of the documents you work on, auto-saving them in the background so you can go back to a previous revision, any time you like? It’s just like Time Machine, Apple’s Mac backup feature, only it’s for individual files. It even lets you compare old and current versions of your file, side-by-side. It’s called file versioning, and it’s pretty rad.

Microsoft Has No Plans To Update Office 2011 For Retina Display Macs

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Photo: Microsoft
Users say this looks "crap" and "very fuzzy" on the Retina MacBook Pro.

Microsoft Office 2011 looks awful on the new MacBook Pro’s Retina display. But unfortunately for its customers, it seems Microsoft has no plans to add high-resolution graphics. While Outlook 2011 does have Retina graphics, the company has confirmed that the rest of the suite will have “the same viewing quality as on any non-Retina device.”