Locked Files

[Shikarnov]

Hi All,

I upgraded to Lion last week, and am going through a little growing pain. Apparently a good many of my files have fallen victim to Time Machine's new locking feature. And even though I've since turned off that pesky "lock files after two weeks" function, files that were locked prior to my turning it off remain locked.

So how can I unlock them -- all of them? Google seems rather unhelpful, pointing me to hundreds of articles about turning off locking rather than actually unlocking previously locked files.

It's slowly driving me insane...

Thanks in advance for your help.

Z

 

[chas_m]

The "lock" function you refer to only affects Apple applications such as Pages. It's actually a brilliant idea -- completely removes the risk of accidentally overwriting a file.

Chances are, if you're re-opening a file you haven't edited in "X" number of weeks, this is likely to be what you actually want -- to make a new version (previously done with "Save As") using the old version as a template.

That being the case, one simply duplicates then closes the old file. Using "save" now functions EXACTLY like "Save As" did, letting you rename the new version. It's one tiny extra step (clicking off the old version) but a lot more safety and file protection IMO.

 

[Shikarnov]

The "lock" function you refer to only affects Apple applications such as Pages. It's actually a brilliant idea -- completely removes the risk of accidentally overwriting a file.

Well, with all due respect to the researchers at Apple, I don't find the idea to be quite so brilliant -- which is why I turned it off as soon as I realized what was happening.

Chances are, if you're re-opening a file you haven't edited in "X" number of weeks, this is likely to be what you actually want -- to make a new version (previously done with "Save As") using the old version as a template.

That's a mighty big assumption, I think. As one part of my job, I maintain websites for clients. Sometimes I don't return to the same project more than once every few months when a client has a design change, or content edit that they can't handle themselves for some reason. That's what happened yesterday. I needed to edit a PNG for a Lightbox script. So I open it in Photoshop, and the file is wholly uneditable. "*** is going on?" I'm thinking. So I do some investigating online. The file is locked. Time Machine's the culprit. I grumble and start looking for a fix....

That being the case, one simply duplicates then closes the old file. Using "save" now functions EXACTLY like "Save As" did, letting you rename the new version. It's one tiny extra step (clicking off the old version) but a lot more safety and file protection IMO.

Sure, I could duplicate it -- but why in the world would I want to pollute my directories with needless copies of things that I'm just going to end up renaming to the original anyway?

Prior Operation: Open, modify, save - move onto the next thing.

Current Operation: Open, try to modify, bang my head against the wall, close, open Finder, duplicate the file, open the duplicate, modify the duplicate, save the duplicate, close the duplicate, delete the original, rename the duplicate.

Surely this isn't the way Apple intended to make things "better"...

There must be a terminal command or automator program or something to make this nightmare end?

 

[chscag]

+1. Agree with member Shikarnov. Not only do I consider this not "brilliant", it's a pain. I certainly don't need to have my "hand held" with file management. Another Lion annoyance in my opinion. Hopefully this will be corrected in the future.