Unsaved pages document recovery

When you quit Pages with unsaved documents, it automatically cleans up the unsaved document content and it is lost forever.

This is why the first thing that you do when you open a new Pages document is to manually save it. That triggers autosave, and document changes are saved locally about every 10 seconds, and slightly more delay when saving to iCloud Drive.

Even if you were using Time Machine, it may or may not have captured the unsaved content in an obscure Pages container location. Still, it is a good idea to start using Time Machine, not just for saved Pages documents, but for the rest of your Mac too.

Had you given the document a name and specified a location that it was to be saved as soon as you created it, Pages and the Mac would save the document in its current state several times a minute, even without Time Machine having been activated.*

Had you closed the second document, rather than closing/quitting Pages, you would have been offered the opportunity to save or discard that document, then offered the same choice wrt the older document, still not formally Saved.

If the first document has been saved (unlikely as that seems), you should be able to click the magnifier at the right end of the menu bar and do a Spotlight search on any phrase in the document, and open any resulting file.

Otherwise, consider this as a object lesson, telling you to:

Save early.

Set up Time Machine or some other backup system to keep a copy of your work.

Regards,

Barry