Opened wrong version of file. Now can't restore right one.

[Rachel987]

I recently changed macbook and also had to reinstall the OS on my old macbook after some issues. Now sometimes when I open files I haven't opened for ages, I get a 'which version of the file do you want to open' dialogue. Today I opened the wrong version of a file, and when I try to open the file I selected, I get a message saying 'The file cannot be opened. It may be damaged or use a file format that Preview doesn’t recognise."

There is no restore option and I have no idea how to get back to the other correct version. Any ideas?

 

[Bigwaff]

Any ideas?

Are you backing up your Mac using Time Machine or another backup utility?

 

[Slartibart]

which file format(s)? this happens only in Apply Preview? which version of OSX or macOS?

 

[f54da]

Interesting, never seen that dialog before. If it's referring to the inbuilt (and not well known) osx versioning feature (which is orthogonal to time-machine) you can view all "versions" of the file via the CLI tool

GitHub - jcfieldsdev/versions: A command-line interface to the file versioning system of Mac OS

A command-line interface to the file versioning system of Mac OS - jcfieldsdev/versions

github.com

 

[Fishrrman]

OP wrote:
I get a message saying 'The file cannot be opened. It may be damaged or use a file format that Preview doesn’t recognise."

This suggestion may or may NOT help.
But try it anyway.

Go to the file that gave you that error msg.
CONTROL-click (or right-click) on it to bring up a contextual menu.
Look at the part of the menu that says "Open With"...
Are you offered any other choices (other than Preview)?
If so, TRY EACH ONE to see if it works.