How can I email a document from iWork without the recipient seeing the intermediate saved versions?

Solution 1:

The versions are not embedded in the files, but instead get stored elsewhere.

Due to the nature of how Lion stores versions, small files get saved entirely, but larger files can track only the parts of the file that changed in fairly snazzy ways to reduce the chance that some trivial change to a very large file uses more than a trivial amount of version space.

When you mail any file, you don't send the version, just the last saved copy.

When you delete a file, the system checks and cleans out versions so you are generally never going to see a large amount of space tracking files that no longer exist.

If you are curious - this terminal command will tell you the sum total of the tracking and storage on your main drive: sudo du -sm /.DocumentRevisions-V100/

I have yet to see a mac with more than 200 meg of storage here, but post a new question if you ever find a bug or situation where this storage seems out of line. Lots of good information on this is on the site as well as elsewhere:

• Do OS X Lion's Versions and Resume features store the cached data for encrypted .sparsebundle images in a secure way?
• John Siracusa's very nice Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: the Ars Technica review : Versioning Internals