How many of you have sat down at your new M1 Mac to write and your list of Scrivener files all showed “Zero Bytes”? And they wouldn’t open, right? Well here’s the solution:
1.Make sure your Mac and iPad (or other devices) are running the latest versions of Scrivener, Dropbox and the macOS, eg, macOS 13.1, iPadOS 16.2, etc., then restart.
2. Once your Mac is fully up, open Dropbox.
3. In the Finder, click Dropbox
4. Click the folder in Dropbox where your Scrivener files are.
5. Right-click (or control click) any Scrivener file(s) you want to open and you’ll see dropdown menu
6. Towards the bottom, you’ll see Quick Actions and below that, several blue & white Dropbox icons.
7. Select the “Make Available Offline” and Voila! There’s your wonderful story.
From what I can tell, that’s the whole issue 95% of the time.
I don’t know if Dropbox allows itself to change that setting for users’ files, but I don’t see how else people would otherwise wake up one day with the issue? Other than trying to open the project from another computer that would have a different setting Dropbox-wise.
(Since this is neither a bug, or Scrivener or OS directly related, I’ll allow myself to retag your thread as Feedback - Usage tips.)
Dropbox can and has changed that setting without notifying the user, most recently by changing their service-wide defaults. And yes, this is the solution nearly 100% of the time.
Scrivener itself can’t and won’t relocate files behind your back. When entire projects are suddenly unavailable, the cause is 99% likely to be outside of Scrivener. (The remaining 1% being cases where you moved the project yourself and then forgot.)