OS X Mountain Lion For Dummies

Saving Your Document before It’s Too Late

If you have a feel for the OS X folder structure, you can get down to the important stuff — namely, how to save documents and where to save them. You can create as many documents as you want, using one program or dozens of ’em, but all could be lost if you don’t save the files (or versions of the files) to a storage device such as your hard drive or other disk.

When you save a file, you’re committing a copy to a disk — whether it’s a disk connected directly to your Mac, one available over a network, or a removable disk such as a USB flash drive or portable hard disk.

Lion introduced three new features — Resume, Auto Save, and Versions — to make your life easier. In previous versions of OS X, applications generally showed a blank page or nothing at all when you launched them. Mountain Lion’s Resume feature automatically reopens all windows that were on-screen when you quit the app. So, when you launch the app again, all the windows are reopened in the same position on-screen as when you quit. Best of all, Resume seems to work with most third-party apps.

Programs have offered Auto Save before, but now it’s baked into OS X. Auto Save automatically saves versions of your work as you work, when you pause, and every 5 minutes, whether you need it or not.

For as long as we’ve had Macs, we’ve saved unique versions of our files, creating and managing them with the Save As command or by duplicating and renaming them in the Finder. Now Mountain Lion ...