Lost Documents Created with Pages
Does anyone know how to recover documents that were created using Pages? They aren't even backed up on my iCloud or anywhere. It's like they never existed. Help.
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If you never manually saved your Pages content once to a proper named document, then its autosave was not enabled and exiting Pages would have automatically cleaned up any work in progress content. If that is the case, there is no recovery possible.
If you did save and rename your document from Untitled.pages, then any change to the document across editing sessions would have autosaved the content, and then the question is where? Approaches you can take:
- Did you look at your Pages File menu > Open Recents menu listing to see if the document name is there, and you can open it?
- Did you share that document with anyone, and can they send it back to you?
- Pages automatically saves documents in the last saved location — until you change that location.
- Was the document [un]intentionally saved on a third-party cloud service, and have you checked there?
- Use the following Spotlight search, either from the menu extras Spotlight 🔍 tool, or a Finder window search field:
kind:pages created:>09/01/2022
That will find any Pages document created since Sept 2022 that resides on your local drive, or iCloud Drive, provided you have Spotlight configured to search and index its Documents category.
Apple's iCloud is a storage convenience, not a backup solution. That is what the built-in Time Machine and an external drive are intended, and would back up what changed on your Mac for the previous hour, every hour that your Mac is running.