Participant

Question

Retrieve older version of a saved design

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
December 7, 2023
3 replies
7650 views

Hi, i spent hours on a design ande inadvertently saved the wrong version. Is there ANY way to retrieve the version that i want/need? Please help!

macOS

Conrad_C

Community Expert

Time Machine is so great because it backs up every hour (if connected). There have been many times when I screwed up, and all I had to do was enter Time Machine and retrieve a version from an earlier hour or day. And then I’m back on track in just a minute or two.

gener7

Community Expert

You don't need to have the Time Machine drive connected, Conrad. MacOS takes file system snapshots allowing you to go back as far as a day or two by simply entering Time Machine and retrieving an earlier version. You can try it without your drive connected and see for yourself.

Conrad_C

Community Expert

You’re right of course. Actually I do know about local Time Machine snapshots, but I wasn’t thinking about them when I replied. I sometimes delete large unneeded unwanted local snapshots to free up storage space. I value the local snapshot feature highly because, as a laptop user, the laptop is frequently not connected to a Time Machine volume but local snapshots means things get backed up anyway, and somehing in a local snapshot can be recovered even before I get back home to where the backup volume is.

Which all just reinforces your point, having Time Machine set up and enabled is a godsend and deadline saver when these “what the heck did I just do” situations happen.

gener7

Community Expert

You tagged your post MacOS. You can retrieve earlier versions.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/view-and-restore-past-versions-of-documents-mh40710/mac

And of course always have Time Machine set up and running at all times. Back up as suggested.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/back-up-files-mh35860/12.0/mac/12.0

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/restore-files-mh11422/12.0/mac/12.0

TM comes free of charge, it makes sense to take advantage of it using an external drive if cloud storage is out of the question.

Conrad_C

Community Expert

You tagged your post MacOS. You can retrieve earlier versions.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/view-and-restore-past-versions-of-documents-mh40710/mac

By @gener7

An important note about that one…the first line says “Many apps…” and not all apps, because it depends on the developer hooking into the macOS version control API.

I don’t know if any Adobe applications use macOS native version control. Photoshop does not; the “Revert to” submenu in the Apple link does not exist in Photoshop. The only version control supported in Photoshop that’s preserved after closing a document is the one mentioned by Myra for Photoshop Cloud Documents.

If you want to see an example of an app that does use macOS version control, check out the bundled Apple apps such as Pages, Keynote, or TextEdit.

Myra Ferguson

Community Expert

If the file is still open (you haven't closed the Photoshop session), then you can undo.

If you saved it as a cloud document (as opposed to on your local hard drive), then you can access version history by going to Window > Versions History.

R

Ram_V8206

Participant

I have saved it on my local disk. Is it possible to retrieve the older versions?

Myra Ferguson

Community Expert

It's possible if you use some sort of Back up solution. If you're on macOS, see @gener7 's post from Dec. 10, 2023.

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