Pages frozen... was working on important document for 3 hours... need help please?

Chris Lemmon wrote:

Open Autosave Information

This is a feature available only in Lion

<OS X Lion: About Auto Save and Versions>

which, as Lion user, you knew all about, of course.

The OP didn't bother to specify which OS version he was using, so, whether or not he can benefit from it is an open question.

Whenever you're working on something you can't afford to lose, save it regularly as you work. If you'd saved your project every five minutes, the most you could lose to a freeze-up is 5 minutes of work. Unfortunately, I doubt that there's any way you can save your three hours' labor now.

You can't unfreeze without risking data loss, all you can do is wait for a longer period of time to see if it unfreezes spontaneously, but don't get your hopes up.

Don't work for longer than the amount of work you are prepared to lose without saving.

I found out how to retrieve any unsave states or files after this happend to me and almost deleted 4 hours of typing.

Select finder by clicking your desktop and click "Go" on the menubar

Hold Option, Click Library which should appear when you hold option with the go menu open

Open Autosave Information

my unsaved file was in there, hopefully yours will be too

Chris Lemmon wrote:

I found out how to retrieve any unsave states or files after this happend to me and almost deleted 4 hours of typing.

Select finder by clicking your desktop and click "Go" on the menubar

Hold Option, Click Library which should appear when you hold option with the go menu open

Open Autosave Information

my unsaved file was in there, hopefully yours will be too

It's been 5 months since the OP posted this, he's probably moved on now.