So I got an official response from the bug reporting team over at Apple about the Lion data-loss bug with non-local volumes.

There response was short and extremely unhelpful.

Currently, if want to close and undo any changes, you must hit Cancel then Revert to Last Opened/Saved, or use Versions to revert. Then, when you want to close again, you should just hit “Close”.

I sent them a very frustrated response.

I’m sorry, but I can’t consider this to be anything other than a Microsoft level answer (which is not a compliment, by the way). We have 80 users who all work on a central Mac OS X File Server. And I am supposed to tell them that in order to work with ANY file on the server they have to remember to “hit Cancel then Revert to Last Opened/Saved and then Close again” a few hundred times a day as they work with their files on the server?

And while I’m telling them this I am suppose to continue to maintain that Apple is a better product than Windows, despite the fact that an Apple client OS cannot work with files on an Apple server OS without erasing their content?

Take 10 people who, for the past 20 years, have had the ability to close a document and click “Do not Save”. Don’t give them any instructions on how to do things “the new way” and see how many of them manage to overwrite their original content. The user interface is very confusing and a very poor design to not provide users with a way, visually, to know what to do. They have the option to “close and overwrite” or “cancel and leave open”. That is all they will see and all they will understand.

I am extremely disappointed with this kind of answer from Apple to a severe data-loss bug.

Sadly, at this point, if this is their official response I don’t expect to see this ever resolved. I fully expect Apple’s official stance to be, “That is the way it is now so get used to it.” They have made those kinds of changes before where people don’t like them (including me at times), but you get used to it because you don’t have a choice. However, none of those have resulted in a data loss. Changing the way iCal, Mail, Finder, Spotlight, etc. look does not cause you to lose data if you click the wrong (and confusing) button. This change does.