I opened Pages – looked down the ‘Recent Files’ list. No sign of the documents from last week. In the days in between I had reorganised my folders. I’d put all the documents relating to our church groups into a series of new folders. Perhaps they had been misplaced – even deleted. 

As I use a Mac searching is straightforward, comprehensive and it’s easy to drill down to a particular date and type of file. No amount of searching and drilling down turned up the two Pages documents I needed. Nothing in the trash. I was beginning to sweat. I didn’t relish the idea of starting again from scratch.

But – I have several backups – “I’m safe.” I thought.

1. Time Machine – Open a finder window and go back in time to last week. The folders change back to the way they were before my ‘tidy up’. I look inside the one we were using – no sign of them. 

2. SuperDuper – I’d made a bootable backup last Friday, at the end of the week. So sign of them there either.

3. MozyHome – Off line backup – only works on my laptop if I leave it on overnight so there was a ten day gap on that one. (My desktop Mac backs up there most nights (don’t let me bore you with the issues there are with MozyHome and my ageing iMac G5 – no don’t)

So where else might they be? Had I saved them somewhere else on the network?

1. iDisk – no

2. Media MacMini – No

3. Desktop iMac G5 – Bingo. Why had I saved them to a folder with the same name as the one on my laptop on a computer upstairs? I can only assume I had earlier opened a file from that Mac so Pages had kept the location as the default for my next save, and the one after that. But there they were safe and sound. Phew.

The moral of this tale? The biggest bug in any computer system is probably the human.