Recurring data loss and freezing in Pages on macOS Tahoe

Although my Pages v14.4 works unproblematically on Tahoe 26.2, you need to understand that Pages has not (yet) been updated to work with any release of Tahoe, save for the forthcoming 26.3 and the Pages version updated for the Apple Creator Suite to be available on Jan 28. Since Pages is now nearly ten months since it was updated, this may or may not be a contributing issue depending upon where you are attempting to save those Pages documents and anything else you may have installed that may cause Pages (or System) interference.

My Mac is backed up by Time Machine to a locally mounted SSD every hour. I consider that mandatory and not just for Pages. Should Pages hang, without any prior save effort, all content will be lost, nothing can be recovered, and Time Machine would have had nothing to back up.

I only save to my local drive, or less frequently, iCloud Drive. The first thing that I do before I enter any document content is manually save the document with a proper name. That initiates autosave and versioning to protect any subsequent entered content. Apple likely has not tested Pages with any other third-party cloud service than Box, which it uses for collaboration. Saving documents to any other Cloud provider, including Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. may prevent Pages autosave from protecting your document — and usually it will throw a dialog informing you it cannot autosave to that destination. Continuing to enter content is a caveat emptor at that point as it is subject to loss.

Pages is sensitive to font cache corruption, as well as anti-virus products, or so-called Mac cleaning applications that may inadvertently remove content from within the application. That makes it go berserk and hang or just crash. It is bad practice to leave Pages open with a document for days on end as some have done.

Sometimes, booting Pages into Safe Boot mode, which rebuilds the font cache and clears System caches can mysteriously restore Pages to normal behavior on a subsequent normal reboot — provided there is no other contributing factor such as other software interference or a failing storage device…

Finally, when Pages crashes or hangs, the very next launch of Pages should be accompanied by holding the shift-key. That prevents Pages from reloading its last saved execution state, and may avert continuing crashes or hang behavior.

Spotlight does not change Pages or any other documents. It stores the index of that Pages document location on your drive for a future Spotlight search request.

Do you (or someone else) have that same document opened on the Mac concurrent with another version of it opened in Pages for {iCloud, iOS, iPadOS}?

Okay. So if I understand it correctly, you have couple documents which has this issue.

Maybe you could try to copy content of those to new document and see if it helps? By the way, are you using Pages with Mac, iPad or browser version?

I had similar type of issue with Numbers and then I used a while browser version with problematic document and entered the data I need with that.

When I use my 2021 16-in MacBook Pro M1 Pro on my lap, its slim, SSD Time Machine drive fits in the palm of my hand and it is small enough to simply tuck under a corner of the laptop. Thus, whether on my lap, or on the desk, I have hourly TM backups.

One thing that will make Pages flakey is if that iCloud storage gets nearly full and Pages attempts to autosave and fails for that low storage reason. Because it is iCloud, Pages content must transit multiple Internet sites to get to Apple's servers. Anything along that route that disrupts the normal connection could cause Pages to freeze, or unfreeze if the cause is brief enough.

I have been supporting Pages daily for over 15 years and have seen users report all manner of issues. Some simply could not be explained, and some, curiously enough, are remedied by rebooting the Mac, either via Safe Boot, or normally.

Sorry to hear that.

Does it happen with all documents, even when starting a new one?

And with problematic documents, are you able to see save history and restore older versions?

Is this document on your local drive, Apple's iCloud Drive, or another network storage location? Does anyone else have access to this document and might have opened it in a different version of Pages?

With the exception of a handful of documents, I keep all of my Pages documents on my local drive; do not share or collaborate with others, and am the sole Pages user here.

Hoping someone can respond to this. I'm having the same problem since upgrading to Tahoe. I've got the new 26.2 update now as well, but often when I try to save my document, it freezes and I have to force quit - sometimes I lose my data, other times, most or all of it is there when I reopen the app. (Activity Monitor shows that Pages is not responding.)

I have a 2025 MacBook Air M4 with updates to all software. I can't believe my old MacBook ran better.

Not with new documents, and not every time. I have a couple of documents that I leave open on my desktop and because I've sometimes had problems with Pages crashing, I try to make sure I save every time I add new text. But every once in awhile, it stalls and I have to force quit. Most of the time, I haven't lost data but sometimes I do. The main issue is not that I lose text though. The main issue is that I don't want it to crash any more.

Thanks for the help, I do hope that the next Pages update solves the problem then.

I do have Time Machine which does back ups whenever I plug it in but I can't leave it plugged in all the time because my laptop is usually on my lap.

I have my documents saved on iCloud so I can have access on other devices, and all my software is the most recent version. I don't use any third party storage.

I have always left my journal open on my desktop and relied on autosave and periodic command saves to protect it, and I've done this for many years, on three different laptops, without any problem at all. The issue only started when I bought my new MacBook Air last year - supposedly faster and more powerful but with the annoying issue of Pages crashing once I upgraded to Tahoe.

So I guess I will continue my stop gap measures of saving my document every time I add a few lines and wait for the Pages update.

I am having the same problem. If I have a Pages document open for a while and then come back to it, if I try to close the doc or save the doc it will freeze. The Pages doc is saved in my Pages folder in iCloud, so it should be auto saving, but it's not.

Tahoe is a dumpster fire!

This is a bit outside my area of expertise so apologies if not relevant but there have been recent posts reporting problems with Spotlight and Pages. Could it be Spotlight that is the other application that is causing this problem?

I am hjaving the same issue. Just lost thirty minutes of good work. This is like using Wordperfect in 1992.