a week of blank files after updating to 3.2.2

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

I updated to Scrivener 3.2.2 last night from 3.1.5. Am still running Catalina atm.

This morning when I sat down to write, I discovered that nearly all (with 1 exception) new content I had written since December 8 is gone. The text and folder icons all still appeared in the binder view as before, and the text icons showed the lines that indicate when there’s content popuated (i.e not just the white rectangle icon of a new empty file), but, if the file pre-existed Dec 8, the text had reverted to what it was prior, and for all the new content created last week, each file is simply blank now.

And for whatever reason, I see no saved version of the project from when the update installed.

Auto-updates were set to every 2 seconds. I unfortunately had full zip backups set to run only on closing, and the project was open all week, so I have no zipped file to restore from. (I know. I can’t believe I did this)

I have been combing through rtf files within the active project’s package contents for hours now, and cannot find a single fragment from the past week’s writing. Easily 20,000 words are gone.

The only promising clue was in the QuickLook folder of package contents - the Preview.html file DID show a few of the missing text files. Of course, it’s just a preview so that only gets me the first 2-3 sentences of them. But it seems like that would mean they were saved at some point, right?

I’m at the edge of my tech know-how here and kicking myself, of course, for not backing up more frequently. I’ve changed that, but I’d love to not have lost 8 days of work. Any advice is welcome.

2

The most likely cause of this is that you simply opened an old version of the project. The Recent Projects menu can be unreliable, especially after software updates. You can locate all Scrivener projects on your system by searching for .scriv files using Finder.

The second most likely cause is a synchronization error, in which the “content” parts of the project don’t match the index used to build the Binder. That is particularly likely to happen with “smart” synchronization tools that purport to “save disk space” by only downloading files to the local system as they are needed. In that case, the files may reappear if you close the project and then open it again. Alternatively, you may be able to force synchronization of the project by (using Finder) making a compressed copy of the project and then uncompressing it.

Katherine