Pages document reverted to empty template, losing hours of work

Two words. Time Machine. That is your mood preserver when you have lost Pages content and need to recover your work. Provided, of course, that you were saving it to the local drive where it could be backed up hourly. Otherwise, your content is gone and there is no retrieval possible — beyond your remaining revert to content.

Personally, I use Time Machine just as a parachutist uses a reserve parachute. The first thing I do before I even enter any content into a Pages document is manually save it to a local drive with a meaningful document name. That enables autosave, versioning, and insures it will get backed up. I never leave Pages running all day with an open document, and instead, save, close, and quit Pages when I am done with it.

I never save or store Pages documents on non-Apple cloud services. These documents, unlike MS Office or Google Docs documents, are treated by Google Drive/Docs as Zip containers and a double-click will destroy the document. Same thing will happen on Windows. When Pages determines it cannot autosave or version to a third-party storage medium, it should pop a dialog explaining (warning) that limiting fact.