After modifying them, many Pages documents have disappeared. I used to be able to find them with a long systematic search through the whole computer. Now I can’t.
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
MacBook Pro (M3, 2023)
The first thing that you do immediately upon opening a new Pages document template is to click the File > Save… button and give your Pages document a valid name other than Untitled.pages. Note the save folder location too as Pages will continue to save documents there until you change it. By performing the initial blank document save, you enable autosave and auto-versioning. That means as you make changes to the document, it will autosave roughly every 10 seconds, and you won't irrevocably lose content when quitting Pages, whether deliberately or by other events.
The whole computer won't have your Pages documents. Just your user account, iCloud drive, or an external drive if they were saved there. Spotlight is a practical tool for finding saved, but lost Pages documents. This will find all Pages documents in your home directory that have been modified since the first of 2025 using Spotlight, or even the search field in an open Finder window:
kind:pages modified:>01/01/2025
Failing that, you launch the Time Machine application from your /Applications folder and on its restore panel, you can use that same Spotlight search adjusted for time frame.
How do I recover missing Pages documents on MacBook Pro?