With the new Mac OS X, Lion, released in July 2011, Pages '09 automatically saves all open documents using Auto Save and Versions. The basic functionality is very easy: open the document, edit, close. That's it. To use Versions and the more advanced functionality, it is a good idea to have a look at Apple's description of the functionality.
However, the autosave functionality is not problem free. There have been reports of people who have lost some data. The data is not autosaved continuously, but at regular intervals, and if you crash your machine between those intervals, text will obviously be lost.
For older versions, there was a problem, which is described below:
Pages '09 before Mac OS X Lion could not automatically save documents, so if you had typed for 5 hours without saving and there is a power failure, you would have lost all your work.
The safest way to handle this is to press ⌘-S to save the document manually as often as possible.
For those who do not trust themselves to remember this, there are a few Applescripts to do this at Apple's discussion forums, for example here and here.
However, the autosave functionality is not problem free. There have been reports of people who have lost some data. The data is not autosaved continuously, but at regular intervals, and if you crash your machine between those intervals, text will obviously be lost.
For older versions, there was a problem, which is described below:
Pages '09 before Mac OS X Lion could not automatically save documents, so if you had typed for 5 hours without saving and there is a power failure, you would have lost all your work.
The safest way to handle this is to press ⌘-S to save the document manually as often as possible.
For those who do not trust themselves to remember this, there are a few Applescripts to do this at Apple's discussion forums, for example here and here.
52 comments:
Unfortunately that exact same thing happened to me last night. I typed for many hours and forgot to press save and my computer shut down. I do really recommend that people save their work... It's worth it. I only wished I had saved mine.
how f'n retarded. i too just lost a lot of work cause i assumed it would autosave like my stupid office program. what on earth was that retarded developer thinking to not include a simple autosave feature.
I've lost hours of work before in iWork apps assuming that they'd autosave. You should check out WorkSaver it's an app that autosaves you iWork documents for you. Seems to work pretty well for me it's at http://tristanchadwick.com/worksaver
ARGH! That is so annoying. No matter how much work you lose 5 minutes or 5 hours, it is stupid that Pages does not do this. I am so surprised at how lame they are on this with so many other great features to this program.
dammit! i just lost some stuff. i was hoping i'd find my salvation here. grrr! *shakes fist at apple* ... i am gradually working my way back to ms word.
Ha! MS word. Joke. Granted, Pages need autosave, however don't let a foolhardy move on your part lead you further down the path to damnation.
i will never buy iWork again (just go to piratebay) if the will not include autosave fgd!!!!
just lost 6 hours of work, and Time Machine? useless in this case......
lots of hate from Italy
This is a superb little programme to solve the problem: http://tristanchadwick.com/worksaver/
try EverSave (http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/eversave.html), it's free and it's even greater than WorkSaver, which is limited to iWork. EverSave can work with a lot of apps.
Wanted to take advantage of the space to release lost work frustrations. AAAAGGGHHRRRRRR!!!!!!! Thanks.
Me too. AAAAGGGHHRRRRRR!!!!!!!
I normally save as a routine, but I just opened a second document to fiddle with a layout before pasting back in to my main document- stupid power cut in our village and I now have to start over again.
It is pretty dumb that Apple didn't include at least the option!
Was writing chap of a novel - my character was listing his thoughts a) b) etc. Pages has bad habit of continuing to indent after you need it. Writing was flowing, in the zone and all that, did not want to stop so made a mistake, I admit and pressed esc to get rid of indentation - whole document disappeared! Gone. Surely Pages should ask if I want to leave doc? Resolved to auto-save but frigging Pages won't let me. Starting to think Apple vastly over-rated. Very, very disappointed. Pages sucks IMO. Am sick to stomach over this
Ironically, Apple's much simpler TextEdit does have autosave.
Screw this, I'm going back to MS word. At least they understand my needs
The same here. Can't believe apple didn't take under consideration autosaving,... it's like WordStar, WordPerfect and MS Word evolution never happened.
And even worse, after struggling to figure out indents and line spacing and other config issues, pages shut down. no autosave, no place to find lost work. It just crashed. Gave me option to relaunch but WHY? My work is gone. Open Office, here I come.
Tried WorkSaver but wouldn't open in 10.6.2
I can only hope you read these posts before you need to. I just lost 12 hours of work... I normally save very often, I have no idea why I didn't today, but the fact is there is NO REASON at all for pages to NOT create a back up as you work.
I am so ill right now, my Apple Honeymoon is over... pathetic
unfortunately my honeymoon with apple is over too. I just lost very valuable work because the slick "pages", unlike word, does not have autosave. way to go apple!
Same thing. All-nighter, going well, paper due tomorrow morning - absolutely no late hand-ins permitted. Crashed, just lost EVERYTHING. Might have to drop this class because of it. That's if I care about my GPA, at all.
Lesson learned: I'm buying MS Office for Mac tomorrow.
Same issue different person. Pages has some nice features, but come on! DOS based programs had auto save.
I got up at 4am to do work that is due in today. Finished it off at 630am. Decided to go for a run as a reward for getting it done. Come back go to watch last night's Football highlights online while eating my Bran Flakes. Screen freezes, only then do I remember I haven't saved. I could almost start crying.
Saw an application in Apple website. http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/foreversave.html
I have installed. Looks promising. Will report after usage.
Saw an application in Apple website. Its http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/ system_disk_utilities/foreversave.html
I have installed it. Looks promising. Will report after usage.
Same here, what a crap piece of software. Just lost hours of work.
I`m back to TextEdit, might rather go with Google docs instead or give MS Word another chance...
i am so upset!! i just lost hours of work on my grant proposal thats due in 2 days!!! i had assumed that there was an autosave feature like every other word processing program in the knwn universe. stupid apple not to have an autosave feature. pages just up and quit on me for no good reason. it took several hours of work with it. why the heck can't apple add a simple feature like autosave? i'm so disappointed right now. i don't want to go back to a pc, but at least ms word never did this to me. grrrrrr let this be a lesson to everyone......remember to save your stuff all the time or use another program.
OK,found out the hard way Pages doesn't have auto save. Therefore for the next 3 hours I saved every 5-10mins. So when the 2nd crash came I was sure I was OK. But on re-opening doc. nothing was saved to the original document. Has anyone else had this happen? Usually you loose everything "post" the save.
Save early, save often.
Command - S
Worse situ ation ever, hate pages crashed, has happened several times and WHEN SAVING!!!!! Lame program, pls d´t buy it it reeeeeaallly sucks!! It doesn´t matter the quality of ur computer, even the latest generations can´t go round the problem.
SAVE MONEY, TIME and go for MS word (many even cheaper versions avalible)
makes one´s question the liking for mac doesn´t it??
manksybook, you just lost your argument.. If I had changed to a windows machine using word, and it crashed; it would have recovered the document to within the last 5 minutes of writing.
Much more preferable to losing it all since the last save point.
Hope you never have to learn the hard way.. or maybe you don't write too much.
When you can write over 1000 words in half an hour, manual saving is not going to be too much of a help if even if you rigorously save.
As for your comment about most word processors not having autosave, you seem to have missed the point, Pages is a premium product aimed at replacing office suites on Macs, at the very minimum it should be offering options that it's competition has. Lets see, the main opposition is MS Office and Open Office, both have autosave and recovery functions, one is free. not much competition is it?
Stop trying to defend the undefendable, it's apple fundementalism at it's worst.
Dear Comment Section
I also would be inclined towards leaving a frustration comment in this Online Comment Section hosted by blogger. Thank you.
OMG THIS %^$&ing Piece of &$%) it just ^(^$ all because of the *%&^ing program not having %*$^ing matrices and %**$ not %$*# having autosave.
Thank you I now feel much better. All I lost was three pages but it was all matrices and trust me they are a ^&%* to write out fully!
I think everyone in the world who uses the computer has experienced this. There are tons of time when I lost my work because it isn't in autosave mode. However, I experienced same thing in the office too. Good thing we have an IT server support there. Having a technical support (Brantford is where I am working) really saves life! Ha! And companies need it because of security reasons. Everyone's connected online and file theft is a never-ending issue.
you know, I like pages better than ms word, but seriously? Just lost entire essay on the dutch
I just lost my business deep thoughts. I put my 2010 Macbook Air 13" to sleep (closed the lid) and then when I opened the lid, the computer for some reason restarted itself and #1 Safari had saved my browsing session in history BUT #2 my business thoughts were GONE when I opened up Pages.... COME ON APPLE PATCH THIS AND YOUR OS X. ! STEVE HOW COULD YOU OVERLOOK THIS FLAW?
My goodness. What a bunch of lazy whiners posting here.
So what exactly is the point of the pages back up file...if it doesn't back up? No Auto save, no back up, no recovered file, what were Apple thinking of ?
That's the point, they weren't.
I might get my typewriter back out...or worse go back to Word.
Seriously? Apple claims to be so good, but this is just a basic oversight. Quite pathetic and leaves me with a sour taste of my recent apple experience. MS may be the bulkier program, but it has simple things like auto save which make a whole heap of difference, as noted in this blog. Come Apple, this stuff is basic.
this is a whiner's comment page. You forgot to check whether Pages had an AutoSave (and how to configure it)? Gee, sorry about that. Some people actually make sure they save their documents manually because they want to, and others won't, because it changes their previous versions too much. Did you know there was a choice? No, and you're probably not much of a writer because you don't do your homework for anything else, either.
Don't like Pages? A good writer might do some research; you didn't. Try http://www.literatureandlatte.com/links.php to start. Why don't you design a word processor or other writing program? Because you expect everything to be handed to you on a silver platter, and then you can reject it if it has (what you consider) a blemish. You're a hack who hasn't bothered to explore the tool you use, and you're lazy, to boot. Blame the tool, not the operator. Same story, over and over.
Was going to buy iWork then this happened with the trial version, I lost 2 hours worth of a debating piece when my mac went flat and can't remember any of it. App called ForeverSave is ment to help but at $12Aus it makes Pages more expensive. Pages you had my heart with all you whizz-bang features, but when I need you most you failed me. :,(
Welcome back Microsoft Word, My trusty steed, I missed you...
Wondering if Lion will solve the problem? It will be interesting to follow.
I found comfort in the communal frustration of these comments...
Not true. I just installed Lion a few days ago, and was working on a Pages document when Pages crashed. The document was not autosaved. I called Apple and they told me it should have been saved and had me a look around in various folders--Documents, Trash, etc.--and then gave up and told me to try someone at Applecare. I am using a trial version of Pages, but I was assured that was not an issue. Very very frustrating...
I cannot express in words how sick i am right now. I was writing the best story of my life or at least one that I would be most proud of. Didn't realize I wasn't plugged in to the outlet and poof....gone. Apparently I had never realized that Pages didn't autosave. Two hours of work. Gone. I want to throw up.
It's Aug 2011 and I just lost couple of hours of tedious technical writing. Putting aside from my fervent desire to rant about how such design gap should not exist this far into the life of Apple Pages, I wish to state instead that I'm very upset that the only way that I can get my copy of Pages fixed is to upgrade my entire operating system. Honestly, I trying to write my dissertation, I am reliant on a number of analysis s/w packages, any of which could cease to function if I upgrade Mac OS X now. I cannot take that risk. But, I cannot afford to have my work lost like this evening. It's just not fair. I should be able to upgrade Page '09 to get this design oversight straightened out without going to Lion.
kturpie - if you read both the post and the comments, you'd note that you have several options besides upgrading to Lion.
What I find surprising is how easy it is to curse Pages, and how few of the cursers had done their research, or even did a simple thing like choose "Save..." from the File menu, or command-S from the keyboard to protect work they now think is priceless. How many of these same people have backups, either on a hard drive, an optical disk, or in the cloud (or even as a hard copy)? If your hard drive crashed, no program could have saved you if you didn't have another backup, and hard drives notoriously crash frequently. (Oh, yes - and your data analysis would be lost, too.)
You talk about using analysis software for your dissertation - did you put as much care into choosing and learning Pages as you did with those programs? Why not? You're writing is arguably as important as your data and data analysis.
Pages is an inexpensive word processor. Pages is provided as a free trial on iMacs and MacBooks. If you try it, and compare it to other word processors and writing programs, and it comes up short, you don't have to buy it, and you don't have to use it. And you certainly don't have to curse it (or Apple).
So Apple disciples insist that it's the responsibility of Apple users to determine, by means of however much research might be necessary, which features Pages does and doesn't offer, and their fault when a feature that's STANDARD on other common word processors turns out not to be offered in Pages. But in the next breath, if I pull out my Android phone, which (by the way) runs Flash beautifully, for instance, the iPhone junkies are saying, "But... but... it's an iPhone! It's sick! It's paradigm-changing! It's..." It's a smartphone that doesn't run Flash and that is subject to draconian development rules in order to ensure a "consistent user experience," regardless of the cost in real innovation.
Here's the thing: Apple appears to assume that their products' OS's are so intuitive that anybody, toddler to senior citizen, should just be able to pick them up and use them. Yet you open an Apple word processor (let's review: what was the type of program that drove many people's very first personal-computer purchase? Oh yes: a WORD PROCESSOR), find that it's NOT intuitive and that it lacks a CRITICAL function, and it's YOUR FAULT.
I like my iMac OK. But I am no true believer. Three out of four of my computers are MS. Two out of three of my house's phones are Android. The iTouch is a beautiful device and we have four of them, but honestly, Apple cultists, it's OK to admit that your favorite thing is not perfect.
Responding to the person above, as I said in a previous post, you don't have to choose Pages. Serious writers might choose their tools seriously, and the one that was installed on your hard drive as a sample may not meet your needs.
Autosave is not a universal feature (note Microsoft Word has AutoRecover, which is a different beast, and which does only one thing, and those results are often difficult to locate).
Also, as most of the people posting here who lost work make claims to be writers, what kind of AutoSave do they want? One that just saves the last iteration? Or one that can recover the last two, three, five... versions (if, as such a writer, I just removed two paragraphs that I thought didn't quite fit and AutoSave kicked in, I don't have the option of recovering the previous version, do I?)
I suspect most serious writers (as well as serious digital musicians, digital video makers, etc.) choose their tools carefully, and take some time to think about where their source material is, whether they could recover it in a catastrophe, and how they'll preserve it and transport it.
Most of this is moot if you buy a new Mac, or upgrade a computer to Lion, where both AutoSave and Versions are automatically available. YMMV. And do you have a backup drive, or a backup in the "cloud"? AutoSave, and its variants, are only one part of the puzzle.
But, really, the point is responsibility for your work. Would you begin a document and write for several hours without saving it and naming it? (It is, of course, in both Android and iOS, automagically saved). Is it really difficult, especially if you consider the work important, to manually save the file every few minutes? Does that really interrupt the flow so much that you're willing to risk your work?
Hi all, I found this blog clearly as I also had the unfortunate occasion of discovering the limitations of Pages at the worst possible time; 8 hours of typing review and research data, meticulously organized in a wonderfully intuitive table (some 20 pages, size 9 & 10 font) *sigh...But back out of the slums of computer freezes and crashes. I found this new app for Mac called iText Express that has autosave and the ability to customize it (save every 30 secs, 2 mins, 5 mins, etc) that is Free and, after doing some research, appears to have all the functionalities of Pages and MS Word. Gonna try this out now, retyping my 20 page, size 10 font document, and will leave a review later.
Also, everyone PLEASE read the reviews and comments on the auto save and version features of Lion + iWork before purchasing it, as there are some notable issues that you may want to discover sooner than later.
Sadly this makes me feel good for msft that they still have a raison d'etre (well I have no idea if word is made for the mac but I assume so). I just wonder if apple employees use microsoft word...or how they can stand not fixing this.
What is more "tragic" is that, three years after the first comment, most people visit this page to vent anger, mostly at Apple, without taking away very much learning at all.
First, your choice of word processing program is your own, and the responsibility for knowing its features and how it works is yours, as well. It is as if you bought a fixed gear bicycle and then bemoaned the lack of brakes when you crashed.
Second, Apple HAS fixed the problem, although it requires that you use its Lion operating system (10.7.x).
Third, and perhaps more obscurely, autosave is not a universal answer. If, for instance, you decided that the first ten pages of your novel were crap, and then deleted them, a subsequent autosave would render them permanently gone when 15 minutes later you decided these ten pages were quite good enough.
Fourth, MS Word does NOT have autosave, but has a much more limited auto recover; if you have ever used it, you'd curse Microsoft, as well, as the recoverable file is hidden deep on your hard drive and named with a gibberish of letters and numbers. And it is not foolproof.
Fifth, if your work is important to you, not only should you either save manually as often as you can, or invest in a third-party autosave, you should also have an automatic backup of your hard drive; and you might even consider an offsite backup as further insurance. Autosave is not very useful if your hard drive crashes and you might recover nothing, or something only after paying experts over a thousand dollars.
Sixth, there are a number of good and very good word processing programs out there that compete with Pages and MS Word, and all much cheaper than MS Word. They include:
WRITE ROOM http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom
Mellel ($39) http://www.redlers.com/
NeoOffice ($10) http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php
OpenOffice (free) http://www.openoffice.org/
AbiWord (free) http://www.abisource.com/
Nisus ($79) http://www.nisus.com/
Scrivener http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php (mostly a writer's tool that also includes writing templates, outlining, organizational and research tools, etc.)
So, the next time you open ANY program, you might consider whether your work will be saved, in what form, and how often; AND you might think about doing a bit of research before you actually begin a major production using any software.
And, as half of the comments here are subliterate imprecations, someone who does not know if their word processor has autosave or not might do very well to use Google Docs, for free, as they're not only unlikely to discover what it lacks in relationship to Pages or MS Word, they'll have a remote backup unfettered by any local computer problem.
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