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Crucial Disappeared Pages Document—not on ext. hard drive and not in iCloud.


Two Apple senior advisors have spent hours with me trying to find a missing Pages document.


They have no idea why it hasn't been saved to iCloud, where other Pages documents are, or why it isn't on my external hard drive. I have backed it up to my external hard drive through Time Machine several times each day.


I've been writing the 60-page document to leave for my kids when I die. I've worked on it daily for over seven months and always clicked "Save changes" before closing it. I've searched for phrases and sentences that would only be in the missing document, to no avail.


I'm close to the end of my life and desperate to find this legacy for my kids.

If you can help me locate it, I won't even know how I could possibly thank you enough.


Device: MacBook Air 2017 Monterey Version 12.7.6

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 12.7

Posted on Sep 28, 2024 4:06 PM

Reply
6 replies

Sep 29, 2024 6:17 AM in response to judith mackay

Launch Pages and ignoring the template chooser that has appeared, select File menu > Open Recent > and see if your file appears in that list. If it does, click that entry to open it.


If the first paragraph was unsuccessful, click the 🔍 tool in the menu extras area at the top right Finder menu bar. This is Spotlight, and it too, may be able to locate the Pages document. In its dialog window, enter the following which says look for any Pages document that was modified since (>) March of this year.


kind:pages modified:>03/01/2024


If it finds it, you can press cmd+R to open a FInder Window with the file selected. You might want to visit the Finder's View menu and select Show Path Bar. When you click on that found Pages document, the path to its location will appear at the bottom of the Finder WIndow.

Sep 28, 2024 4:31 PM in response to muguy

Dear muguy,


I've saved it on Pages, but I don't know how to navigate to the folder because there's no record for the title of the document.


I wonder if you could please explain to very old me what I so ignorantly don't understand about what folder it would be in. I wrote it in Pages, and each time I closed it, I clicked "save changes."


I was always able to find it by opening Pages, and clicking on it's title under Recently Opened. But now it's not there. Nor anywhere.


I appears to have evaporated, with no trace.


I've opened many dates on my ext. hard drive, dates I know I was working on the document, but there's no trace of it on any back date.



Sep 29, 2024 11:50 AM in response to muguy

Oh, you dear helpers, Muguy and Viking, I've found the missing document!


Hours spent on the phone with Apple's senior advisors with no success—and now there are fast solutions from you.


I clicked on every date on my ext. hard drive until I found a copy from months back.


It was an old version, but as mysteriously as it had disappeared, the newest version popped up on a recent backup from a few days ago.


The weirdest part is that I'd searched the external hard drive with Apple's advisors in the same manner and the same dates, but no version of it was anywhere. One advisor explained it wasn't there because Pages is only saved to iCloud and not to external hard drives.


So I only searched the hard drive again because you assured me that it must be there, as I'd always backed it up.


I trust you can sense what this means to me. I'll be thinking of you with endless gratitude as I complete the long letter to leave for my children. May you be blessed.









Crucial Disappeared Pages Document—not on ext. hard drive and not in iCloud.

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