Turn Off Auto-Save in OS X Mountain Lion
Aug 22, 2012 - 5 Comments
If you don’t like the Auto-Save feature of OS X, you’ll be pleased to discover that turning it off is just a matter of checking a settings box from OS X Mountain Lion onward.
- Open “System Preferences” from the Apple menu and click the “General” pane
- Check the box next to “Ask to keep changes when closing documents”
- Close out of System Preferences
With automatic saving turned off, you will be asked to save files manually each time you attempt to close a file or document that has been modified, just like past versons of Mac OS X.
This setting is much easier to use than disabling the feature in Lion through defaults writes commands, and unlike in Lion it doesn’t disable Versions too.
Just remember, with this feature turned off you will need to save documents yourself again. If you’re already accustomed to the automatic saving on file change behavior, it’s probably best to leave enabled.
Enabling the “ask to keep changes when closing documents” option doesn’t disable auto-save; it prompts you to confirm whether you want to keep the changes you’ve made to a document since you last explicitly saved it.
See http://tidbits.com/article/13187 for detailed information on this subject.
Well, well. I turned auto-save off when you posted about this option. I did not like auto-save. Would you believe it, in spite of my dislike I obviously got used to rely on it. I just turned auto-save back on for good
I noticed that with auto-save turned off, sometimes a version was *NOT* created when saving manually.
It is really not wise to fight new system features to hard. In the long run, maintaining all the kluges to keep new unwanted features at bay causes more work than it saves.
How do you switch this off in MAC OSX Lion
chflags 1600017 /Users/”YOURHOMENAME”/Library/Saved\ Application\ State
Just so you know, the following snippet in Terminal…
/Users/”YOURHOMENAME”/
Can be achieved by simply typing…
~/