I have a Pages document in iCloud that will not open. I have Time Machine. How do I get to the version of the document that is not corrupted?

Question

I'm in a bind. I tried to open a Pages document that I saved from the current version of Pages on my iMac this morning on my iPad, which has the current version of Pages of the iPad. It would not open on the iPad. Now it also will not open on the iMac, or on the Beta of iCloud Pages.
If it were on my hard drive, I could use Time Machine to recover the most recent version, but it's in iCloud. I've been told that implies that there is a local copy, but I don't know where that is.
It's a book manuscript I've been working on for months. I'm not happy.
Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

Your opinion of Apple products seems unusually harsh. I know how iCloud works and I'm generally pretty happy with it. I also like Pages a lot more than MS Word, and somewhat more than NeoOffice. Word is overripe with so many features Microsoft keeps radically changing the interface in the desperate hope that somehow they will make it easy to use again, but instead, they just confuse everybody with the unnecessary changes.
They had menus, until there were too many options to fit the screen, so they added submenues, until that wasn't enough, so they added dialog boxes, until that wasn't enough, so they added tabbed dialog boxes, and realized that a lot of commonly used features were too hard to get to, so they added the Toolbar just as a shortcut to the more common features and then came up with the unforgivable decision to eliminate the menu interface entirely in the Windows version of the product and replace it with The Ribbon, which took me so long to interpret that I stopped using Word altogether.
NeoOffice is simpler and quite useful, but it was iCloud that sold me on Pages. It's great being able to review and edit documents on iOS devices in addition to automatically synchronizing across Mac OS X devices.
I have options for synchronization with Box and DropBox, and I have a network share I can use, if having a local copy isn't important, but I find that having a local copy (like with Box, DropBox and iCloud) is great because each computer I use has Time Machine, so I don't have to rely on the service to restore a file. I can get it, myself. It's easier to browse to the version I want in Time Machine than it is to estimate the time I want to restore from and hope that someone else can find the right version of the file from whenever they made a backup to restore it for me. I have unhappy experiences from this kind of request to restore stuff.
I find Box and DropBox to be somewhat crude compared to iCloud. I like Apple's new attitude toward saving files. When I edit in Pages and exit, the file is saved. If I edit a file and the power goes out, I generally lose a sentence or less. In traditional apps, I can easily lose hours of work, unless I remember to manually save as I go.
iCloud is not a general remote file storage facility. At it's root, it is a roaming version of whatever you have on iOS devices. So, if I want to access a file from multiple devices and not have to worry about versions, I use iCloud.
This problem I just had was the first problem I've had with iCloud, and with Time Machine, and I use them a lot. Having someone tell me where the local copy of the documents are fixed the problem.
I love Time Machine.
For myself, when I upgraded from Bento 1 to Bento 2 on several computers, one of them choked on my data file. I followed Bento's directions to recover the data file until it said to reinstall Bento 1 from original medium. I couldn't find my disc. Yes, I had bought it. I don't steal software. But I couldn't find my disc.
So, I used Time Machine to restore Bento 1. Just try restoring an older version of an app in Windows from any backup software available to Windows and see how far you get.
I helped someone else recover a couple thousand email messages using Time Machine instead of dealing with the email service because we could open Mail, go to the folder where the messages had disappeared when she had a power glitch, and then browse back until we found the backup just before the messages disappeared. The restore took about 20 minutes, but again, this verges on magic.
I've used Time Machine to restore an older version of OS X when someone discovered that a crucial app wasn't ready for it yet. The glitch was that she hadn't backed up for a month. She kept ignoring the warning prompts. So, when I showed up, I had her do a current backup before doing the restore. We then restored to the old OS, restarted in the old OS and opened Time Machine to recover all her documents, pictures, etc. from the current backup, so she didn't lose a month of work. This is another thing I can't do with other backup programs.
So, I'm generally pretty happy with Apple. Once someone told me where the local copy of my iCloud documents resides, I could take care of this most recent problem.