MacOS – Does Mac OSX Mountain Lion autosave/versions interact badly with git

autosavegitmacos

I use git with some of my documents and wonder if the autosaved versions created by Mountain Lion could interfere (or even break) git versioning?

This is important for me as I do not work on Macs exclusively. Do I need to edit my .gitignore file to account for the native versioning system in OS X?

Best Answer

Short answer: don't worry about it.

The versions data is kept separate from the file itself, which is why you can just email a file to someone on a different OS and not worry about the version info mucking things up.

Unless you are checking in the hidden folders where OS X stores temporary files and versions, git will never know if a file is being versioned or saved by the OS.

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MacOS – Where does Lion’s autosave feature save past versions

There are a couple SQLite databases located in a hidden folder on the root of your hard drive that are tasked with tracking the files and the differences between the versions.

The directory is:

/.DocumentRevisions-V100

The two databases are:

/.DocumentRevisions-V100/db-V1/db.sqlite
/.DocumentRevisions-V100/.cs/ChunkStoreDatabase

Source: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.ars/14#versioning-internals

Document Save Permission Error – Fix ‘The Document Could Not Be Saved’ on macOS

I was able to fix the problem for CleanWriterPro by removing extended ACL from the affected directories (Documents, Desktop):

$ chmod -R -N Desktop Documents

For others with the same problem, I'd suggest checking the permissions of at least the following places:

~/Library/Autosave Information
~/Library/Containers – see Unsaved Files in OS X Lion
the folders containing the problematic files

Use the command

$ ls -le Documents

to show also the extended ACLs when looking at the problem. Finder will not show all ACL information.

There is a related discussion at Apple Discussion Forums, Lion Permissions Problem. It proposes the solution of removing all ACL from home directory and restoring the ACLs for some default folders. Please read the entire post from there; but the commands are:

chmod -R -N ~
chmod +a "everyone deny delete" ~/ ~/Desktop ~/Documents ~/Downloads ~/Library ~/Movies ~/Music ~/Pictures ~/Public

The ACL prevents the user from deleting or renaming the default folders.

An unintuitive but maybe safer(?) alternative is described at OS X Daily: Repair user permissions in Mac OS X Lion

Best Answer

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MacOS – Where does Lion’s autosave feature save past versions

Document Save Permission Error – Fix ‘The Document Could Not Be Saved’ on macOS

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