My app updates without my knowledge and I have lost all my recent files. Everything from 2018- 2024 is stlll available. This is an app I use often and for years as been reliable through updates. I am thoroughly disappointed and frustrated. There is nothing showing in recently deleted. My files are gone. What are my options
iPhone 14 Pro Max, iOS 26
@all:
The update of Pages has nothing to do with existing Pages documents, wherever they are stored. Only the application is changed and that is not in any user area.
Pages documents that were previously saved would automatically have autosave enabled, provided these documents were saved to a filesystem where autosave is supported. If not, Pages will throw a dialog telling you this. If you ignore this warning, you had better frequently use a manual save or the unsaved changes will be lost when quitting Pages or worse, a power outage.
With regard to the previous paragraph, for those that foolishly leave unsaved Pages documents open and then proceed to update Pages, I have no idea what would happend to that document, since I certainly don't do this. Consider it caveat emptor and not Apple's fault if it whacks the open document and changes are lost. My rule of thumb is to immediately and manually save a new document before any content is added.
The user is responsible for keeping track of where their documents are stored. Remember, that Pages will continue to store revised as well as new documents in the last saved folder location — until you change it.
If your Pages documents are on Spotlight indexable media, then you may be able to locate missing documents by using the Spotlight menu bar tool 🔍, a Finder Window search field, or even the Dock's App tool with cmd+2 to open the Files panel. Then you can do some of the following, where strings are case-insensitive, and < or > mean before or after when used with dates:
kind:pages created:12/01/2025-02/22/2026
kind:pages name:partialname font:baskerville
kind:pages modified:>02/01/2026
@all:
The update of Pages has nothing to do with existing Pages documents, wherever they are stored. Only the application is changed and that is not in any user area.
Pages documents that were previously saved would automatically have autosave enabled, provided these documents were saved to a filesystem where autosave is supported. If not, Pages will throw a dialog telling you this. If you ignore this warning, you had better frequently use a manual save or the unsaved changes will be lost when quitting Pages or worse, a power outage.
With regard to the previous paragraph, for those that foolishly leave unsaved Pages documents open and then proceed to update Pages, I have no idea what would happend to that document, since I certainly don't do this. Consider it caveat emptor and not Apple's fault if it whacks the open document and changes are lost. My rule of thumb is to immediately and manually save a new document before any content is added.
The user is responsible for keeping track of where their documents are stored. Remember, that Pages will continue to store revised as well as new documents in the last saved folder location — until you change it.
If your Pages documents are on Spotlight indexable media, then you may be able to locate missing documents by using the Spotlight menu bar tool 🔍, a Finder Window search field, or even the Dock's App tool with cmd+2 to open the Files panel. Then you can do some of the following, where strings are case-insensitive, and < or > mean before or after when used with dates:
kind:pages created:12/01/2025-02/22/2026
kind:pages name:partialname font:baskerville
kind:pages modified:>02/01/2026
When updating Pages v14.4 to v15.1, the older version of Pages is removed. However, in my own experience, not one of my iCloud Drive, or local iOS Pages documents were removed from my iPhone 17 Pro Max, or my M4 iPad Pro.
Your only option is to use the Files app to look again at iCloud Drive, or on your local device filesystem. If you were the source of the document removal, and it was on iCloud Drive, Apple offers a continuous 30-day window to restore deleted documents.
Tested: iOS 26.2.1, iPadOS 26.2.1
The same thing just happened to me. I have lost two days of hard work after updating Pages. Why don't you warn of this? The files aren't in iCloud or Time Machine. They are just gone. Is there any way of getting them back????? This update has wasted a huge amount of my time.
After this last update I lost a file full of recipes I had been collecting and creating for the past 6 years. I have always backed my devices up on iCloud, but none of the missing documents are there. This seems to be tied to the new version of Pages, I have documents from 2019- 2024 as long as they weren’t edited in the past 2 years. I work as a professional chef and rely on having tried and true recipes for quick catering responses. Is there anything that can be done to retrieve the lost documents?!
I just had exactly the same thing. I was working on a file in an older version of Pages, I updated the application and just noticed that it had not been using AutoSave for more than an hour and a half. I am a professional writer and I am extremely annoyed by such blatant amateurism. Does anyone know how to recover lost data?
Naivety perhaps, but not amatuerism.
Autosave is enabled automatically after the first manual save of a Pages document, and to a supported storage medium where autosave is supported. The latter would be no mystery as Pages would issue a prominent dialog to that fact where autosave was unsupported. Caveat emptor if you ignored that dialog.
In the decades since autosave was first implemented in Pages '09 v4.3 (I believe), I have never lost document content because I save first on a new document creation, then add content. Even MS Word does not automatically enable autosave, and then on the Mac, only if you are using OneDrive as the save location.
This happened to me as well. I updated pages a couple weeks ago and lost a huge pages document I've been working on for a long time. I can't find it anywhere. Apple, is there anything we can do!!?
Lost files on new update of Pages
