for the entire four years I was in art school the common wisdom was to always save your maya files as Maya Ascii (as opposed to Maya Binary) so that if they refused to open in a different version that a different school lab computer had, you could just rename the version in this exact way and they would open completely fine
this is why versioning in file formats should be for the format itself, independent of software that's using it. that way, you only bump the number if it genuinely has changes that will make it hard to load