Accessing *all* associated package versions of an "old" Seurat object/project? (perhaps considered also as a general R scripting/project question)

[nataliapadillo]

I am relatively new to R:
How do I access the packageVersions() (or similar command, like sessionInfo()) of an rds object or .Rdata SEURAT object from MONTHS ago? I simply would like to know: what were all package versions used at THAT time (i.e.: Seurat, tidyverse, Matrix, scales, cowplot, ggplot, DropletUtils, etc etc etc)?

For context: I am running single cell analyses with Seurat. I try restarting the session and simply loading the object to my environment-- but when I run any of the above commands, only the ambient/'current' package versions pop up (I presume they are automatically loaded when the object is), and I know those are certainly not the full extent of the packages used and I can tell they are newer versions. Therefore, I load the rest of the packages, but as expected, they have all updated to newer versions (I had highly likely done so in other single cell experiment projects I have been running at the same time). I am having dependency issues in not being able to run a function (DropletUtils) that previously worked months ago, so I want to know what package version of that function + others I used to use which worked. Makes sense?

If it cannot be retrieved, what is your preferred/favorite way to document what package versions you are using in your projects?

Thanks in advance!!