Pre Version

This control panel keeps previous saved versions of any kind of document you tell it to. If you've ever deleted a paragraph or a file and then, three or four days later, wish you hadn't, you'll like this. Tell it what to track, e.g. all Illustrator documents in the graphics folder (but not in the scratch folder), all WordPerfect documents in the papers folder, and all FileMaker documents anywhere on your disk. Tell it how many versions to keep. Then, every time you save changes to a document, Pre Version rescues the earlier version from being overwritten. Keep as many versions as you want. By comparison, Alladin's commercial FlashBack requires you to specify each document (not each kind of document) that you want to keep previous versions of. I was glad to see that Pre Version runs fine under OS 8.1, even though it dates from 1992. It was posted on archives earlier, with the docs in MacWrite II format, and I think not many people saw how valuable a saftey net it is. So, with the permission of the author, I've printed the docs to a reader format, and am resubmitting it to Mac archives. Shareware $35. I'm not making any money from this, but it's one of my all-time-favorite utilities. John Rethorst