I’m not sure why Apple has never included an ‘autosave’ into Pages or other software for that matter. If you accidentally shut the document without saving, or if the program crashes, you can lose a lot of work. I get very absent minded while I am working, and can sometimes go for an hour or two without remembering to save. Foreversave Lite is a free app that adds autosave to any OS X program. It has lots of different options too.

It’s called foreversave lite click here to download it.

After you install it it will take you through some questions. There’s an option to have it autostart at login – I selected this as I know I will forget to run it otherwise. This means it’s always in the background and whenever I open a Pages document it will automatically save.

Once it’s installed you’ll be greeted with a window like this:

What you now need to do is add the programs that you want the autosave feature to work for. When you click on the plus sign you will see a list of all the running apps:

So for example I click on the plus sign and add pages. You will then be guided through some more options for that program. For pages I chose to save every minute:

You can also choose to save when you switch to another application, and to exclude certain folders form autosaving. Any files in these folders will not be autosaved. Not sure why you’d want this, but I love software with flexibility like this.

Now whenever I have a pages document open, it autosaves every minute.

All this in the lite version! You might be wondering what the full features version does… The full version of ForeverSave lets you browse through all the backups! You can go back to any previously saved version of the document you are working on and have a look at it. A bit like time machine but for an individual document.

This produces a neat little A5 booklet from 4 A4 pages or it can even do an A6 booklet as follows:

You can download this neat little application from here.