Pages says files are locked, but they aren't.

The Pages app on my M1 MacBook Air refuses to save any changes to .pages files, saying "The document “...” could not be saved. The file is locked". This happens with almost all files.


These files are not, and never were, locked.


I have restarted my device twice and reinstalled the application but that didn't work.


What can I do to fix this? Running on macOS Sonoma 14.0.

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 14.0

Posted on Oct 16, 2023 11:56 AM

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Posted on Oct 17, 2023 08:28 AM

If your Documents folder is really parked on Google Drive, then undo that so that the Documents folder is again local on your Mac. I would consider Time Machine backups to a local drive far more reliable and available than Google Drive, and in fact, that is what I do.


Google drive is not really compatible with Pages documents because if you double-click one on Google Drive to open it, the Pages document is viewed as a Zip container and Drive attempts to unzip it. This is not the case for MS Office documents where Google has coded Drive to not treat them as Zip containers.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Oct 17, 2023 08:28 AM in response to akatsos

If your Documents folder is really parked on Google Drive, then undo that so that the Documents folder is again local on your Mac. I would consider Time Machine backups to a local drive far more reliable and available than Google Drive, and in fact, that is what I do.


Google drive is not really compatible with Pages documents because if you double-click one on Google Drive to open it, the Pages document is viewed as a Zip container and Drive attempts to unzip it. This is not the case for MS Office documents where Google has coded Drive to not treat them as Zip containers.

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Pages says files are locked, but they aren't.

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