Is it possible to recover overwritten files on Mac?

Is it possible to recover overwritten file on Mac?

Hi everyone! I'm really desperate at the moment and at the same time extremely angry with myself because I had a real catastrophe happen to an important Pages document yesterday: I have been summarizing books for a final exam for the last 3 weeks. The document was already 65 pages long, however, for some reason I didn't back it up. Yesterday, I worked on that file again. I frequently press "save". However, as I opened the file after a break, I was shocked to see that I had somehow deleted all the previous 60 pages and only the last 2 pages of that day's work were still in the document. The thing is that I have overwritten the original document because of my frequent in-between saving.

Best Answered by

Amanda Wong

Answered on Monday, April 29, 2024

Unluckily, if you are sure the previous Pages document has already been overwritten, it is impossible to recover the version saved on the drive, but there are some workarounds you can try.

The fact is that you haven't created a new file as you always edit within the only Pages document, but you accidentally deleted or lost some contents on the Pages document. Then you can try to recover Pages with Auto Save and Versions on Mac, a feature enabled on Mac by default. Here's how:

Locate the target Pages document.
Open it with Pages.
Go to File > Revert To > Browse All Versions of the desired Pages document.
Choose the one you need and Click Restore.

In addition, if you have connected the Time Machine backup drive to your Mac while you are editing the Pages documents, you may restore the file to a previous state from the Time Machine backup.