How can I recover a deleted pages document?

The 'Recents' list is just that—a list of files you have opened recently. File names stay on the list until they are ushed off by files that have been opened more recently.

Unless you have emtied the trash, there's a good chance your 'deleted' file is still in the Trash folder. If you've emptied the Trash since putting it in the Trash, recovery may be more difficult.

If it is in the Trash, drag it out and place it in a different folder, then try opening it.

If it's not in the Trash, or can't be opened after moving it out of the Trash, enter Time Machine, and work your way back to a date before you deleted the file. Time Machine may still contain an earlier version.

Regards,

Barry

Time Machine is not meant for Flash drives and does require a small investment in an external hard drive to get started. That drive should be 2.5 - 3x the size of your internal drive. You recover documents from a Time Machine drive by launching the Time Machine application in your /Applications folder to access that mounted external drive.

If you have no Time Machine backup, your means to recover that deleted file just evaporated.

If you've not yet done so, you could try a Spotlight search on ".pages"

It will have a large number of hits, as it should find all the Pages files on your Mac.

Looking further:

If your accidental deletion was recent, and not much has been saved (by you, other users of the computer, or by the computer itself), it may be possible to recover the file.

In past times, 'deleting' a file removed its entry from the directory of the device holding the file, and marked the space holding the file as 'available', but did not actually remove the file. But having its space marked 'available' made it vulnerable to being overwritten by any data being saved after that deletion, and once overwritten, it was no longer accessible.

There were applications available then that could find the bits and reconstruct some or all of the file, and there were (and probably still are) data restoration companies with more powerful applications that could do a more intensive search for parts of the file, spend more time at it, and could, in some cases, restore even partially or completely overwritten files. Those talents came with a large price tag, though, and probably still do.

A net search for 'data recovery software' may bring up some affordable candidates, or may serve as an object lesson on the importance of backing up as least the important files.

Good luck!

Regards,

Barry

kind:pages AND (created:>05/01/2021 OR modified:>05/01/2021)

This will find any Pages document on the local drive that was created or modified after May 1, 2021, provided the Spotlight category Documents was selected and the local drive has been indexed by Spotlight.

Looks useful.

Where does it get entered?

Where do I choose the category?

Regards,

Barry

You can enter this in the Spotlight panel from the menu bar Spotlight icon, or in a Terminal Window's search field.

System Preferences > Spotlight > Search Results -> Documents.