But nonetheless, applications die, and despite our best efforts we’re gonna have files saved in .graffle or .keynote or .chat docs. What we really need is an OS level version migration system, similar to Time Machine, but which migrates documents, according to a user’s settings, to newer versions of the same documents. Of course it saves the original, Time Machine style, for posterity’s and provenence’s sake, but basically at any time a new version of some app comes out, the service would migrate them – maybe once a month, or whatever you set it to.

This really shouldn’t be that hard – iView and DeBabelizer have a myriad of converter information saved in them to open documents – it would be relatively trivial to develop a set of converters that migrate your applications according to your preferences. I would love to see this, more than anything, as a future feature of an OS. Just make it automatically work. The vast majority of people out there really don’t care that they are losing some original metadata when they migrate their files from MS Word 95 to MS Word X, and if you did care, or were an archivist, you could set your settings appropriately. And the system could, of course, migrate over the important metadata – date created and modied, original application version, etc.