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Disappearing Pages document in Ventura and Sonoma

I have been working on a long paper, labeling topic sentences with numbers to try to keep versions in different languages synchronized. I had been working for half a day or so on one file to make sure a dozen or so quotes paragraphs had all been included from the originals. In the process I opened another Pages document to check on something, When I went back to the document I had been working on, it was gone. That has happened before with Graphic Converter. But in that case when I saved and closed other image documents, the missing document reappeared on my desktop. I never had this kind of problem until Ventura and Sonoma came on the scene. I'm getting rid of the computer that I upgraded to Sonoma and now only ships with Sonoma because it constantly "helps" by doing something that I am trying to do. Ventura has fewer crazy behaviors, so that is what I am stuck with.


Could Pages be trying to save the disappeared file to iCloud?


Since I don't want my crucial files on Apple's servers. I haven't turned iCloud on.


Thanks for any ideas.


[Re-Titled by Moderator]

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 13.3

Posted on Oct 17, 2024 8:47 AM

Reply
2 replies

Oct 17, 2024 9:01 AM in response to Spinthrift

Pages will not autosave your content unless you initially and manually save a document with a name other than Untitled.pages. You need to remember where that folder location was set to on that Save panel as Pages will continue to save into that folder location until you change it. If your Trash icon reveals it contains content, look in there too.


However, if you never saved your document, assuming that Pages would do that for you, and if you quit Pages, then the document content and any temporary files are gone forever.


In a leap of faith, I am going to assume that you are using Spotlight to index the Documents on your Mac and that a simple Spotlight query might find that document on your Mac for you. Using the Spotlight menu bar tool 🔍, enter the following which says look for any Pages document that was modified after (>) Oct 1:


kind:pages modified:>10/01/2024


If you get a result, arrow down to it and press cmd+R to open a Finder window with that Pages document selected.

Disappearing Pages document in Ventura and Sonoma

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