{"id":11880,"date":"2015-07-30T11:07:38","date_gmt":"2015-07-30T15:07:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=11880"},"modified":"2015-07-30T18:04:16","modified_gmt":"2015-07-30T22:04:16","slug":"disabling-versions-and-reclaiming-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2015\/07\/30\/disabling-versions-and-reclaiming-space\/","title":{"rendered":"Disabling Versions and Reclaiming Space"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have been <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/mjtsai\/status\/608335249521692672\">having problems<\/a> with the system <a href=\"https:\/\/support.apple.com\/kb\/PH18862?locale=en_US\">Versions feature<\/a>. On one volume, nearly half the total space is consumed by the versions database. I think it&rsquo;s supposed to automatically prune old versions if more space is needed, but it doesn&rsquo;t, so I instead get errors from <a href=\"http:\/\/nothirst.com\/moneywell\/\">MoneyWell<\/a> that it can&rsquo;t save its database.<\/p>\n<p>The versions database is managed by <a href=\"https:\/\/developer.apple.com\/library\/mac\/documentation\/Darwin\/Reference\/ManPages\/man8\/revisiond.8.html\">revisiond<\/a>, but as far as I can tell there are no built-in tools for controlling it. The only way to manually reclaim space seems to be to <a href=\"http:\/\/osxdaily.com\/2012\/02\/20\/clear-versions-history-auto-save-cache-data-in-mac-os-x\/\">delete<\/a> the <tt>.DocumentRevisions-V100<\/tt> folder, which will delete <em>all<\/em> the versions.<\/p>\n<p>I would like to selectively disable the Versions feature for certain volumes, but there doesn&rsquo;t seem to be a way to do that. As far as I can tell, there isn&rsquo;t even an official switch to disable it entirely. <a href=\"http:\/\/apple.stackexchange.com\/a\/180013\/2121\">This answer<\/a> suggests checking &ldquo;Ask to keep changes when closing documents,&rdquo; but that doesn&rsquo;t work. <a href=\"http:\/\/apple.stackexchange.com\/a\/52390\/2121\">This answer<\/a> says that you can set the <code>ApplePersistence<\/code> default in Terminal. At least that works on a per-app basis, because it can also make some apps like TextEdit not function properly.<\/p>\n<p>But the bottom line is that I wouldn&rsquo;t have a problem with Versions if it would automatically compact its database.<\/p>\n<p>Update (2015-07-30): Here is <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/apple\/2011\/07\/mac-os-x-10-7\/14\/#versioning-internals\">John Siracusa&rsquo;s discussion<\/a> of the versions (a.k.a. document revisions) feature.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have been having problems with the system Versions feature. On one volume, nearly half the total space is consumed by the versions database. I think it&rsquo;s supposed to automatically prune old versions if more space is needed, but it doesn&rsquo;t, so I instead get errors from MoneyWell that it can&rsquo;t save its database. The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[131,105,649,30,903,375,1050],"class_list":["post-11880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-bug","tag-documentmodel","tag-esoteric-preferences","tag-mac","tag-mac-os-x-10-10-yosemite","tag-moneywell","tag-textedit"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11880"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11884,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11880\/revisions\/11884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}