Today I’ve opened a rarely used file on my computer. And got the weirdest message in ages: ”file is locked because you haven’t made any changes to it recently”. After a quick search I became apparent Apple has a new feature to auto-lock files.

How to disable the feature

• Goto the System Preference menu;
• Click the Time Machine settings menu;
• Click the Option button;
• Unset checkbox “Lock documents [] after last edit”.

Typical info message on Os X Lion for file locking.

Image 1: from the Apple support website [1]

Thanks to the article[2] of Dave Taylor I found the solution.

[1]: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3921?viewlocale=en_US

[2]: http://www.askdavetaylor.com/locked_havent_made_changes_recently_error_mac_os_x_lion.html