Accidentally deleted section

TL;DR- I have a copied and renamed scriv folder with the folders and scrivx project inside. Is there any reason I should not try to open it? Any possible damage to the original file if I try to open it?
~
I was merrily typing away on some large chapter revisions and not watching the screen, and I must have somehow highlighted and deleted the entire chapter. When I looked up the editor was blank. I tried undo, but it was greyed out. I tried ctrl+Z but nothing.

  1. I save automatically to Dropbox but I’d turned off synching temporarily for another unrelated reason and it was still off. So the file content from right before I started these revisions is safe in dropbox. If I can’t get the deleted pieces back I can recreate them.

  2. However, I will cry just a little bit if I’ve really lost them.

  3. I thought maybe the file hadn’t autosaved yet on my laptop, so I immediately copied the scrivx file (not the whole scriv folder), pasted it to my desktop, and renamed it.

  4. But I couldn’t open the renamed file b/c it didn’t have the settings/snapshots/files folders. So I copied those folders, too, and put them together with the scrivx file in a new folder ,and gave that folder a scriv extension.

So my question is - can I try to open the copied and renamed scriv folder to see if I caught the document before an autosave, and see if my accidentally deleted stuff is still there? The settings/snapshots/files folders are exact copies of the ones in the original project. Will that cause any problems?

I hope this made sense.! Thank you.

I’m answering my own question b/c I took the plunge and tried it. It worked.

So, in a nutshell - I deleted a whole section of new stuff accidentally and couldn’t undo the deletion. None of the backups on my laptop or in dropbox would have had the new stuff. I know I set the autosave to save every couple of minutes, so before it could autosave with the new section missing, I copied the whole scriv folder and renamed it. When I opened the copy, the missing section was there.

Whew!!