Win PCs often start getting serious problems when they are three years old. Sometimes starting all over, format the disk and install a fresh up-to-date copy of Windows and all your other software, might make things better for a while, but PCs have a rather short active life span.
PCs are cheaper than Macs, but in a sense you get what you pay for. A decent Mac costs 2-3 times more than a cheap PC from the nearest computer dealer, but you can use the Mac 2-3 times longer without problems. At work, those with Macs get a new one every 5-7 years, whereas active PC users change every 2-3 years. One consequence is that PhD students often have to get a new PC when approaching their final year because the old one is slowing down too much.
One thought that comes to mind – depending on your hardware, you might be running into a problem with your storage controller and some sort of write caching being in play. It’s a common tactic to cache disk writes into memory instead, to take advantage of the speed difference (even with SSDs). The storage controller driver reports back “yes, this has been written to disk” and the application doing the write can go back to doing what it is doing. Then it’s up to the OS and the storage driver to actually write the blocks to disk.
If there is a problem in the driver somewhere, that actual write to disk may not have happened, and that could be why you’re losing data you thought you’d saved.
On server-level hardware where the performance boost for doing this is important but the data preservation is also critical, the storage controller is backed up by a small battery – so even if the system loses power it can still push those final writes out to disk.
First thing I would do is go into Device Manager and see if there are any options in my disks or storage controllers about write caching, see if they’re on, and if so, turn them off. This might result in a bit of a performance loss depending on how much you write to your disks. Then I would investigate the driver versions, device firmware versions, and BIOS/UEFI configuration to see if there are updates or configuration options there.
Sorry, Lunk, but this is poppycock. With care, there’s nothing intrinsic to Windows or PCs that would cause this to be true. And without care, the poor PC gets serious issues far sooner than three years, but that’s a user education issue.
It’s a general observation based on a number of years watching what is happening with both my own and colleagues’ computers. Starting takes longer and longer, sudden freezes become more common, etc. Intrinsic or not, a 4-5 year old Win PC is usually not very fun to work with. The explanation probably lies in your words “with care”. People in general only use their computers, they don’t “care” for them…
You’d need to do a teardown comparison to know for sure, but I’m wondering how much of the “Apple Premium” goes to Apple shareholders, and how much of it goes to system design, components, and build quality, all of which would contribute to long term reliability.
Sorry to hear you’ve been having this problem. I just advised another poster on backups and saving in the (extremely lengthy) post below. Skip the parts having to do with syncing:
One thing to be clear on: In Windows Scrivener, the option ‘Backup with each manual save’ will only make a backup when you press Ctl-S to do a manual save. With this setting, you can consider Ctl-S as similar to what you would do in MS Office, and save frequently, due to your temperamental PC. You’ll end up with a lot of zipped backups. A zipped backup in Scrivener is a copy/snapshot of your entire project, and is what you’ll want to restore from when a Windows crash botches your project. You’ll want to change the setting “Number of backups to retain” to something high, best case being that you change it to Keep All, and delete them yourself after a writing session.
Best of luck,
Jim
My Dell laptop will be 4 years old in Oct and still runs great. I’d love to keep it for a couple more years. Win 7 has been very good to me, not looking forward to moving on to the next MS OS.
I did… Lots of work last night and today on the computer. Well, not a lot of work so much as a lot of searching and figuring. I haven’t responded yet, because I don’t know if the crash problem has been solved but… Well, let’s talk about Scrivener first.
I have been ctrl-s saving a LOT since the crash problem started. Like I said, every paragraph or two. So I’m in the habit of doing that already, thankfully. I still think it’s worth looking into bug-wise, if that’s a possibility. Computers may crash once in a while, and a person who’s been diligently saving shouldn’t lose whole sections if it happens.
On the subject of the computer crashing–and I still don’t know if this has fixed the problem, but I’m hopeful. Comparing my program installs to my event viewer (which I hadn’t done before because I thought it was a hardware issue) I noticed that Microsoft OneDrive installed itself on 4/30/18, and my first crash came less than 24 hours later.
I didn’t even know what it did, honestly. I didn’t choose to install it. But apparently it syncs files and settings, and it was, it turns out, the cause of another problem I was having with the window I was typing in occasionally just going inactive. Since I uninstalled OneDrive, I haven’t had the problem.
It seems a little too coincidental that the crashes started immediately after installing it. We’ll see.
One thing I want to make sure you understand, so my apolgies if you already get this, but Ctl-S saving by itself in Scrivener for Windows* will not save you, as you’ve already learned.
If you’re used to how MS Office saves, where, for example, if you save your open Word doc and keep working, you can be confident that the data since your last save is recoverable in the event there is a crash, understand that Scrivener’s save process does not work the same way. Despite Scrivener’s auto-save or your Ctl-S, if a crash occurs the open project may become corrupted and/or data may be lost.
This is what you’ve experienced. I have experienced it myself, back when Windows Scrivener was more prone to crashing.
Only a zipped backup will give you something to restore from.
That’s why in my earlier post I recommended setting “Backup with Manual Save”, so you get a zipped backup with each Ctl-S. Ctl-S without generating a zipped backup gains you nothing.
Again, my apologies if you aready know this.
Jim
*In Scrivener for Mac, saving may have more of an impact on project recovery.
The general observation is just that - an observation. I have an IBM windows laptop, purchased back in 2002, that still works like a charm. I have another HP laptop from 2009 that is still working. My daughter has HP from 2010, same thing. My point is Macs are not better or worse than Windows machines.
Wherever you store your scriv files. Scriv documents have a structure, and it’s pretty clear if you poke around in there. It looks like Scriv lost an index (which is perfectly reasonable for it to do in a crash, honestly. It had the file, and during the crash it updates it with god only knows what). But the RTF files should all still be there, just not indexed. Inside the project folder will be a .scrivx file (that’s an XML file, and if you’ve got the right tools, you can parse it for yourself. Or edit it with Notepad. Not a great idea, but you can). There’s also a Files folder. Inside that folder is a Docs folder, and inside that are RTF files. Which may, or may not, contain your disappeared text. They’re numbered, without names (at least, mine don’t have names). You can open them with OpenOffice, Word, or Scrivener.
%APPDATA%/Local/Scrivener/Scrivener/Backups (or whatever else you’ve designated as your backup location) should contain a set of zipped backups of your project. I rotate through 5 backup files; you may have had it set differently right before the crash.
Those two places are where the data is stored, and you may – MAY – be able to recover your lost text there.
I’m with ChaosKirin on this one and I appreciate your frustration because I’ve had this happen multiple times. I’ve also posted in the forum and contacted customer support. I’ve set up the auto-save and done as many of the suggestions that I could to fix this problem. But the pure simple fact is this: 1. Not all of us are as computer savvy as people who post here. 2. As customers of Scrivener, we shouldn’t have to deal with this issue.
It is clearly, at least in part, a software issue, so despite what anyone says, whether you represent Scrivener or not, Scrivener DOES BEAR SOME RESPONSIBILITY for this issue. They are not absolved by pushing this off as a hardware issue, or an incompatibility with other programs issue, or a virus, or user error, or whatever excuse is en vogue that week. As much as I despite Microsoft sometimes, at least this sort of thing would NEVER happen with Word. So, my advice to Scivener is this: consult the Microsoft model and set up your saving mechanism so it’s similar to Word. Because if your program is branded as unreliable, you’re going to lose more customers and not get new ones. And we all know what happens then.
Unless you have activated “bacup on manual save” doing a manual save with ctrl-s doesn’t do much good because Scrivener automatically saves every time you stop writing for a few seconds. A better way to make sure you don’t lose big chunks of text in case of a crash is to split the text up in smaller pieces, more sub-documents. If you get a crash exactly while Scrivener is saving, then you only lose that small sub-document.
And you are right to be so. I’ve dealt with Word for nearly two decades now, in all its incarnations, including on a Microsoft corporate machine with a Microsoft corporate IT-maintained image, and Word STILL lost data because of third-party software, bad luck with power, hardware failures, etc. I’ve written two technical books and contributed to half a dozen more, scores of white papers, and countless more technical documents where Word was the only choice. Hell, I’ve lost data with Notepad, Notepad++, and any other editor anyone can think of.
Scrivener for Windows is where I have lost the least amount of data. I have had to retrieve data out of the component RTF files, so I have had to be a bit more educated about what the file formats are, but it’s done a remarkably good job at preserving my work somewhere (unlike even more modern versions of Word, which are MUCH better about the whole thing than Word 2000-2003 ever thought of being).
This attitude is akin to “I drive the car, I don’t have to know how to maintain it.” Well, no, you don’t need to know how to perform the tune ups and oil changes and tire checks, but you should probably know when to make the appropriate appointments, or at least pay for your choice of automobile roadside service so when the inevitably entropic events occur, somebody can bail you out. Same for software.
I haven’t followed this thread, so I may be missing the point. But it seems to me that precisely what makes Scrivener able to do things that Microsoft Word cannot and will likely never do is that it uses an entirely different data structure that is not amenable to “the Microsoft model.” A Word document is a discrete, self-contained file. A document in Scrivener is part of a project composed of multiple files, and the project has to have an indexing structure to relate the files/documents properly to one another. (And I’m probably oversimplifying even this.) A power outage between saves could corrupt the necessarily-open project index, and thus make even the most recently saved versions of documents unavailable. Hence the repeated suggestions in this thread to create backups as well as saves, since the backups would preserve the index structure.
Only the old .DOC files were a single file – a very crappy proprietary binary format that was easily corrupted, no matter how many thousands of man-hours they threw at trying to idiot-proof Word.
The .DOCX format looks like a single file, but if you rename that .DOCX to .ZIP, you can browse inside it and see that it’s actually a collection of various files, mostly XML and known binary formats (like PNG, GIF, JPG for the pictures you add). So Microsoft increased the reliability of Word by moving to the exact same sort of file format that Scrivener uses. They just rely on the hidden ZIP archive trick to compress the final size down, because you’re not going to place the large research files into a Word document that you would into a Scrivener project.
Thanks, Devin. Something was itching at the back of my mind about .docx files actually being composite, but I didn’t really know. Always appreciate it when actual knowledge shows up!
And a PS: For any and all good that MS Office’s .???X files do for the world, one more tip of the hat to the late, lamented Phil Katz, who made the product of his labors public domain as the ZIP file format. (Enlighten me further if I’ve got any of that wrong!)
I appreciate everyone’s suggestions about making sure your work is backed up, but will users really back up data every paragraph to make sure that new material is constantly saved in the event of program shutdown or power outages? The point here is that we shouldn’t have to. I don’t care about the program file structure. I only care if the program does what I want it to. I don’t know all the intricacies of my car. I just know that if it doesn’t get me from point A to point B, I’m going to either get it fixed or buy a different car.