Restoring Unsaved Documents

jc84,

Pages prompts you to do a Save if you shut down your computer properly by selecting Shut Down from the Apple menu. If you just turn it off though, it can't save it. To answer your question, if you didn't save your document, there's no way to retrieve it after a shutdown.

-Dennis

Welcome to Apple Disucssions

Mac programs will also ask if you want to save a document, project, etc. upon quitting the program or shutting down the computer, but if you just pulled the plug or flipped a switch off, there was no power to the Mac for it to be able to ask you. One reason to always properly shut down programs & the Mac rather than just cutting the power.

Pages does not have an auto-save feature. But even a Windows machine won't save your document if you just pull the plug.

You said the power was turned off, not that the computer was shut down. Instead of using the power button to get the message to "restart, shut down, cancel, sleep" use the Apple menu & choose Shut Down (or Restart or Sleep). That may be the reason there was no message (I'm not going to try it on my Mac).

The ability to auto-save is a function of programs, not of the Mac OS itself. Pages still doesn't have this.

But, the other situation is that...as many others are dealing with..."it quit unexpectedly" while pages asks us to save....at this situation, it won't restore the unsaved document after I reopen pages. Do you have any suggestion about this issue?

I've seen those posts of Pages crashing a close or save. I have no ideas. Pages has never crashed on me, no matter what version or what kind of document or source of document.

Wow. I'm saddened. Even Microsoft Word has an autosave- by default saves every 5 minutes, so if your computer locks up you have a recent copy of your work. "Serious" programs like QuarkXPress have this as well.

My macbook pro just locked up this AM - it does this cool thing where it comes on but there is no way to see the screen (brightness keys don't work, screen is just off). So I have to hard reset it, and I lost all my work in Pages.

Computers will continue to lock up for some time to come - even macs. If Apple wants a mature iWork product - iWork NEEDS AUTOSAVE, in Numbers as well as Pages! Come on guys - here is one feature Microsoft has that you need. Get it in there ASAP...

I found a script that might help - it autosaves a document in Pages every 5 minutes. Hey Apple - BUILD THIS IN...! Important! Now! How can iWork be mature without autosave?!?!

http://scriptbuilders.net/files/autosavepages1.0.html

Actually - a windoze machine DOES autosave your Office documents...! even if you haven't named them yet... so yes, even if you pull the plug, you'll have a copy. From 5 mins or less ago.

iWork should do the same.

I'm considering ditching Pages because version 3 (iWork 08) crashes on me at least once each day. And this happens on both my laptop MB-Pro and PowerMac.

Liquid,

Have you tried logging on in a different account, then using Pages? It would be a good test to see if there's some conflict in your user account. Or have you tried quitting Pages, trashing the com.apple.iwork.pages.plist files, then restarting Pages?

-Dennis

I must admit I'm too busy to experiment. There's a fair amount of writing to do and as a results I've reverted to iWork 06. I am sure that Apple will debug this thing at some point.

I just have to say that I think it's pretty pathetic that iWork doesn't have an auto save feature. I know for a fact that windows does with Works. I would think that auto save would be one of the most basic, top of the list, standards for ANY word processing system. I would think that it would be listed just under be able to see what you type! I just closed my MacBook and it randomly shut off. I didn't push the button, I didn't pull the power source. It just shut off and I lost an entire paper.

Good work thinking about your consumers Apple. I certainly won't be buying anymore programs from you. I'll go spend my money else where, with programs that actually work.

Welcome to Apple Discussions

Autosave is not the same as the warning dialog that comes up when you close a document or quit a program or the power goes out with an un-saved document open. Granted, autosave would allow you to go back to the last saved version, but so would manually saving. Even then, if you've never saved the document at all, autosave doesn't have any idea where to save it.

I do agree that autosave is a feature that should be added to Pages. The only way for your request to be "heard" is to leave feedback for the Pages team.

I've created a new account on my PMac and opened a Word document with no problem.
This suggests the problem lies in my account.