Pages not saving on macOS Tahoe, causing lockups and lost edits

On macOS Tahoe 26.0.1, Pages v14.4 will autosave documents after that documents initial manual save to a proper document name. You know it is autosaving because there is no black dot that remains inside the red icon of the document title bar. Pages is designed to save to your local drive, iCloud Drive, or an external physically attached drive with read/write permissions. It will even save to a mounted volume from my Synology DiskStation. By default, it cannot save to a Windows NTFS formatted drive.

If you are attempting to save to a non-Apple cloud service such as Microsoft's OneDrive, Dropbox, or Google Drive, you are on your own…

I have absolutely no issues creating, writing, or saving Pages v14.4 documents on macOS Tahoe to those locations above that I mentioned were compatible. Confirm that you are using Pages v14.4 or later with Tahoe. If not, visit the Mac App Store and update it.

If you are running any anti-virus software, so-called Mac "cleaning" applications, or other incompatible software, that may have a bearing on Pages, if not the operating system itself, behavior.

By default, when you first start a new Pages document, enter some text, and before your initial save operation, the document titlebar will have a black dot in the red "traffic light" that I have surrounded with a yellow box for emphasis:

Once you save and give the document a proper name, you will never see that black dot again as Pages autosave saves your changes as you make them. Like this:

However, if you want to live dangerously, you can gag Pages autosave and only manual saves will do what autosave would do for you. Additionally, attempting to close the document or quit Pages will throw a dialog that looks like this on Tahoe 26.0.1:

Click delete and your unsaved document changes are gone forever. I don't recommend this as sooner or later you will click the wrong button… Unsaved changes are not caught by Time Machine either.

If you want to live dangerously without Pages autosave, and I do not recommend this — you would visit System Settings > Desktop & Dock panel and in the Windows section, enable Ask to keep changes when closing documents.