Is it possible to restore an older version of a Pages doc without using Pages?
17th December 2012
My answer to Is it possible to restore an older version of a Pages doc without using Pages? on Quora
We recovered it!
It turns out Pages (and other OS X apps that track versions) saves copies of the file automatically in the /.DocumentRevisions-V100/ folder on the root of the hard drive.
We recovered the most recent non-corrupt version of the file from there using the command line.
Step one: switch to a root prompt:
$ sudo su
<enter account password>
Step two: List all of the files in that folder with their modified date, to make it easy to spot likely candidates (since the filenames themselves are meaningless):$ ls -lah /.DocumentRevisions-V100/PerUID/501/*/*
Hopefully there will be something a bit like this that matches your expected last modified date for the document:/.DocumentRevisions-V100/PerUID/501/5d/com.apple.documentVersions:
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 6 root wheel 204B 11 Dec 20:35 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102B 11 Dec 20:29 ..
-r--r--r--@ 1 simon staff 261K 11 Dec 20:35 C02D5229-7972-4618-9288-90A9FEEAD44C.pages
Step three: copy the file to your desktop:$ cp /.DocumentRevisions-V100/PerUID/501/5d/com.apple.documentVersions/C02D5229-7972-4618-9288-90A9FEEAD44C.pages /Users/simon/Desktop/
If you’re lucky, the recovered file will open just fine (you can then save a duplicate and continue working with it).
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