It’s been around since OS X 10.7 Lion, so you can give it a try!
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It’s handy when I make changes and want to revert some of them, but not others. I also use Time Machine too.
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I voted Frequently. I have, for more than 10 years, successfully used Numbers for “online collaborative spreadsheets which are fully editable” to allow all team members (40 to 50 players) to record their availability for each week’s competitions (with auto-colorising responses along with conditional highlighting) for players to choose from, from a drop-down menu. (or add other info in a notes cell, etc).
Invariably, as many are non-computer savvy persons, and perhaps using Windows computers, or iPad or iPhone devices (Android devices can see, but can’t edit) to choose from the dropdown menu, and may mess things up including deleting a sheet totally.
With Versioning and tracking changes (called Activity) I can use Versioning to go back in time to get the spreadsheet back to functioning correctly again.
And I like the idea that one can just grab a section of the “in the past” data, copy it, and bring it into the “now” document and paste the old data into the new document.
Highly recommended for all collaborative documents.
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Thanks, Adam. I thought you meant using it in Sonoma.
I’m still soured from my experiences years ago. When trying to look at earlier versions, the Mac ended up corrupting EVERYTHING. After a while I started doing copy-paste of the files contents to another file, knowing that my actual file was going to end up corrupted. After a while longer I stopped trying to use versions entirely. I’m still not willing to take a gamble.
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I’ve used versioning once or twice in NisusWriter Pro. Never anywhere else. That’s once or twice in about five years. If it went away, I’d just be a little more careful. Never used it in iCloud, which I no longer trust after I did something that caused it to not just back up my files but start erasing them in their expected locations. (Yes, I must have done something that made it happen, but it should have warned me!)
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When I became aware of versioning’s existence, long time ago, I tried it once just to see how it works. Never used it since, I voted “never”.
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I didn’t know about versioning. The only versioning I’ve used is Time Machine.
Also I don’t optimize disk storage because then you can’t do backups like Carbon Copy Cloner or Blackblaze, right? I don’t know about Time Machine in that case.
That’s why I have 2 TB on my MBP M1 2021. I want to make sure I have one local place with everything on it in addition to my external and cloud backups.
It’s the same with TM. Once something has been evicted it will no longer be backed up locally. I guess one could argue the iCloud version is the backup, but some of us prefer to have one unified local backup under own control. Personally, I would never turn on optimize disk storage and I always suggest getting so much disk capacity that users won’t have to resort to something like that. Apple’s config options are silly overpriced for sure, but I’d rather pay that than wrestle with eviction and the potential one-way road it becomes. And since resale value of Macs is usually excellent, I’d argue that if you run into capacity limits, it’s probably a good idea to consider a new Mac so you don’t have to deal with eviction.
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I have never had any issues with versioning and it can be quite helpful to fix edits.
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I voted Never. I know versioning exists, but have never felt the need to explore it as an option. Perhaps I am just set in my old-fashioned ways: I sometimes save a new copy of a file if I want to preserve the original in case I might need it later. Once that potential need is no longer relevant, I delete any earlier copies.
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When versioning was first introduced, it didn’t work for me. When I tried to browse the versions, I got an error “files of type http:// are not supported” or something like that. Others had it too, based on various discussions. Apple ignored that problem until sometime between Mojave and Monterey (I skipped the intervening releases), so I found it was fixed in Monterey. I figured if Apple didn’t care enough about versioning to make it work for everyone, why should I?
Besides, as a senior citizen, either “Save As” or making a copy first is more intuitive than me.
Finally, somewhere along the line, I found a bug in Preview that when I duplicated a file and then made a change to that duplicate and saved it, the change was also applied to my original. Not helpful.
So “Never” for me.
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I know a lot of Pages and Numbers people who end up having to use Revert quite often. Why they are deleting or “losing” their working copy of their document so often I have never figured out. lol
I responded “never”. I have a few recollections from the earliest incarnation of versioning in MacOS and found it abysmal. I can’t remember what I did about it anymore. But I’ve completely forgotten about it or turned it off (maybe?). I can’t say that I remember that option in Onyx to remove doc versions (on Monterey 
). Maybe I’ve got a bunch of old versions … off to look.
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I’m familiar with versioning, but I did not know it was available in iCloud.
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I choose “Never”, because that’s closer to “Almost Never” than it is to “Occasionally”. 
I suspect we’d have seen much greater adoption of the “Versions” feature if Apple had been successful at killing “Save As” back in Lion. The addition of Versions and the removal of “Save As” clearly were related to each other.
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If I remember correctly, versioning was introduced at the same time as Apple’s revised document model that did away with “Save As”. That same document model requires me to press “Delete” every time I want to close an unsaved document, which really doesn’t feel right to me. Why am I deleting if I never intended to save anything?
Tinderbox is probably the only third party app I use that has adopted Apple’s new document model. It used to save copies in a special folder but switched to using versioning at the same time. Several years ago I had a document that got corrupted. No worries, I thought, I’ll go back in versions. But I couldn’t get to them. Every time I tried to open my corrupted document Tinderbox crashed. And versioning is only accessible if you are able to open the document. Arghh.
I can see a couple of ideological flaws in Apple’s versioning model. It’s already been mentioned above that versioning doesn’t work when you transfer documents between macs, or store them on a server. But for me, the bigger worry now is that I don’t know exactly where all my documents might be stored. Imagine for example that I need to travel to a country where I need to take seriously the possibility that the secret polic might want to examine my computer. I could think that I’ve deleted all my sensitive files, but Apple have very kindly made a stash of them (including their editing history) that I can’t access (and may not even know about). Of course I know that Howard Oakley is my friend (thanks, by the way), but I can imagine most people in that situation wouldn’t.
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Just in case this wasn’t sarcasm, it’s because the act of creating a new document automatically creates a file in some temporary location, to which your edits are auto-saved.
When you close the file, you then need to specify where you want to keep it for real, or delete that temporary file without moving it anywhere.
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Yes, so the fact that I rely on autosave and Resume to always open and reopen an “unsaved” document or three in TextEdit across restarts is genuinely awesome. But that doesn’t really require versions and the parallel universe of UI and storage required to support them, it just requires a distinction between a document that is intentionally saved, or not. The problems really start, in my opinion, when there’s a disconnect between an already-saved file that hasn’t had changes since, and the same file where changes have been made but no indication exists in the file system and closing the app doesn’t prompt you (either because windows are configured not to reopen when you quit and relaunch, or you explicitly close and aren’t prompted, both of which preferences I always habitually change). I think autosaved versions need to correspond with the on-disk file, or otherwise you risk operating on or transferring a file that’s not actually canonical in the way you may be mislead into thinking it is.
And yes, I fully accept that this is a difficult thing to do right in a way that would be pleasing to everyone, but as it stands I’d rather just do without versioning at all, and have robust Resume and autosaving. I think Apple overegged the pudding here.