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Please help me! A .pages file desappeard from my desk

I kindly ask you for help. I wanted to open a file page where I had worked this afternoon but it disappeared from the Mac.

I've already done the obvious searches: name, recent file, basket etc ...

I have a list of tables for a charity dinner on Saturday 18th May: 100 names divided by tables and it's all gone. I will never be able to put everything back together. Can you help me to figure out where my file can be finished or have an idea on how to recover it?

Thanks thanks thanks!!!

Mac Pro

Posted on May 15, 2019 3:37 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on May 15, 2019 4:12 PM

If you started with a new document and did not save the content even once, then when you quit Pages, that Untitled.pages document would be permanently lost.


If you did save your Pages document once, and gave it a meaningful filename, then it would continue to autosave with your changes every 10 - 15 seconds. That document would survive your quitting Pages, and would also be on a Time Machine backup of your home directory on the startup drive.


If you remember the filename, you can launch Time Machine Restore from Dock : Launchpad : Other : Time Machine, and use the arrow to go back in time to just before you lost track of the file. If you find it, you can select it, and click Restore.


If you accidentally moved the folder containing the document, or the document itself to the Trash and emptied the Trash, then other than paragraph two, your document is gone, and unrecoverable.


If you have Spotlight active on your startup drive, and in System Preferences : Spotlight : Search Results : [√] Documents selected, then you should be able to locate the document with the following Spotlight search:


kind:pages AND name:"partial filename"


That quoted partial filename is only if there is white-space in the search string, otherwise you can enter a unique, unquoted partial name, and if it is on the startup drive, it will find it. Have you also looked in iCloud Drive : Pages folder?

1 reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

May 15, 2019 4:12 PM in response to Vali55

If you started with a new document and did not save the content even once, then when you quit Pages, that Untitled.pages document would be permanently lost.


If you did save your Pages document once, and gave it a meaningful filename, then it would continue to autosave with your changes every 10 - 15 seconds. That document would survive your quitting Pages, and would also be on a Time Machine backup of your home directory on the startup drive.


If you remember the filename, you can launch Time Machine Restore from Dock : Launchpad : Other : Time Machine, and use the arrow to go back in time to just before you lost track of the file. If you find it, you can select it, and click Restore.


If you accidentally moved the folder containing the document, or the document itself to the Trash and emptied the Trash, then other than paragraph two, your document is gone, and unrecoverable.


If you have Spotlight active on your startup drive, and in System Preferences : Spotlight : Search Results : [√] Documents selected, then you should be able to locate the document with the following Spotlight search:


kind:pages AND name:"partial filename"


That quoted partial filename is only if there is white-space in the search string, otherwise you can enter a unique, unquoted partial name, and if it is on the startup drive, it will find it. Have you also looked in iCloud Drive : Pages folder?

Please help me! A .pages file desappeard from my desk

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