How do you stop Mountain Lion from making endless copies and backups of everything?!

Question

I already have a similar topic on this when I needed to figure out how to stop Mountain Lion from making endless copies of my text edit files and I was going to try the disabling of it that someone in that thread suggested, but I can't find where the Versions backups are being stored.
Anyway, tonight I cam across a new problem, when I went into "about this Mac" and looked at my Storage, I had almost 1gb of data in the "backups" section. I just happened to have Finder open when I went into the Time Machine in the status bar and when it entered Time Machine, I had dozens of copies of my desktop. Thing is, I don't have my Time Machine hard drive connected and I don't have a Time Capsule router/hard drive. And don't give me this garbage about how "It's not real backups, it's just a snapshot" or whatever, because the ONLY things that I have stored on my computer that I have altered since I got mountain lion is two Text Edit files and the Finder Desktop (and yes, I have checked almost all the programs I use, and of the things that Time Machine will open in, those are the only things that have backups listed that I can access) and almost 1gb is being taken up completely needlessly with the computer backing up things onto itself. Obviously these are more than just snapshots and are obviously the real files because after throwing EVERYTHING on my desktop into a file, that file is only 3.8mb in size, so that almost 1GB in backups is coming from SOMEWHERE.
The solution I aluded to in my first sentence also depends on going into the Terminal to make each individual app stop auto saving Versions, however, since my desktop is being backed up, there's no program to stop Mountain Lion from doing that.
Can anyone help me figure out how to make it stop backing up? Seriously, almost 1 gb is being totally wasted on a series of desktop items that are 3.8mb in size, one Text Edit file that is 250kb in size, and another text edit file that is 41kb in size. What person in Apple would possibly have thought this endless backing up of files onto the main hard drive would have been a good idea? So in a year if I did nothing but go on the internet, save one picture to one file on my desktop and did nothing else with my computer, would I have 200 gb of desktop backups that the computer saved onto itself? Are you kidding me? OR failing that, can anyone tell me how to find this damned backup file and delete it? I'm not an idiot, I know how to plug in a hard drive or flash drive and backup my information, I don't need my computer to be making hundreds of copies of every single file on my computer that I change slightly onto itself that not only needlessly eats up it's own space, but if the hard drive died, all those "backups" would be gone too because it wrote the backups to itself.
I am so frustrated by this totally ridiculous and wasteful "feature" they put in, it does nothing but waste hard drive space with it's hundreds of copies of everything you alter slightly. And I am absolutely not starting any video editing projects until I figure out how to turn this off. If around 4mb of total text and desktop backups add up to almost 1gb in a few weeks, what the heck is a video editing project going to end up in with size? Am I the only one completely flustered by this ridiculousness? Is there any point in writing into Apple to complain or are they just going to say "No, we're brilliant, we think this is an amazing feature so you just have to deal iwth it and when your hardd drive fills up, too bad, jerk!"?? Help! Thanks!

Answer 1

Well as I pointed out in my post, "Sadly, my Text Edit documents are still all there, every single time I opened them and made a small change, there is another copy stretching all the way back to the day I installed Mountain Lion." so if you can explain to me how July 26 - Aug 16 is a week, I will concede that it is a good idea. Short of that, no I have been capable of making my own backups since I was 16 years old (16 years ago) I don't need my computer to endlessly do it for me in a way I am completely unable to shut off. That's what I have external hard drives, flash drives, a DVD burner, Drop Box, E-mail (as in emailing copies to myself) and icloud for. If I am doing something and I don't have access to a single one of those options, I don't know why I brought my computer with me in the first place. And I don't see how you can say it's an illusory gain in disk space, hundreds of copies of text documents, garageband files, Final Cut files, Motion Files and basically any program that makes files onto my comptuer that I can myself make incremental changes to, those all need to be stored somehow. Again, if you can explain to me how July 26 - Aug 16 is a week, I will agree with you that that is a good thing because IF it only saved for a week, it wouldn't be an issue. Sadly, no matter how many links you post, I still have text edit backups stretching from today back to July 26. They're not going away and I have no reason to beleive any other file I edit is going to go away either since they haven't been. They're all there eating up HD space and this imaginary "week" limit is simply not coming into effect. I hate it and there needs to be a simple way to simply shut it off. I didn't spend hundreds of dollars on external drives just for my main hard drive to be filled up with hundreds un useless, undeletable backups of stuff I already have backed up.