@leitskev I apologize in advance if I repeat things others have said, as I’ve only skimmed this thread. 
You are not.
This is a scenario specific to Windows Scrivener–I’ve never read of it occurring on the Mac side. It used to occur more frequently with Windows Scrivener v1, until the developers introduced a tweak to auto-save in one of the last v1 updates. This tweak greatly reduced how often posters raised this scenario, so I don’t see it mentioned as often now on the forums, but it can still happen.
I am not technical, so I only speak to the symptoms of the scenario. It seems that, under certain conditions, when the Windows operating system crashes, open Scrivener docs become corrupted. While auto-save generally works, in this scenario, as you’ve found, auto-save won’t help you. (ETA: I just noticed in your posts you said your PC “froze” not “crashed”, but in the end if the result is an unplanned/forced reboot without shutting apps down gracefully, I think the result is the same: corruption of open documents. Posters have also written of this occurring after sudden PC shutdowns due to power failures.)
The symptom is empty documents or documents whose contents have become strange symbols. Either way, the text in the live project is not recoverable, and the user must fall back to a zipped backup taken prior to the OS crash. This may be a flaw in Windows Scrivener, or it may be a flaw in the QT framework that Scrivener is built on, or it may be a flaw in the way the Windows file system handles files during system crashes. I don’t know. But I assume that it will always be a possible scenario, so I’ve implemented processes to mitigate the risk.
Until your PC stability situation improves, I strongly recommend you make the following backup setting and process changes to mitigate your (at the moment very high) risk:
Enable these settings via File > Options > Backup:
- Back up with each manual save
- Compress automatic backups as zip files
- Use date in backup files name
Set Retain backup files to Keep all backup files. (The usual recommendation is 25, but more on that below.)
With these settings, every time you press Ctrl-S a time-stamped zipped backup will be generated to your backup folder. Ctrl-S should feel familiar to use, as it’s similar to saving in MS Office and other Windows apps.
Keep Scrivener running as long as you like, but any time you need to step away be sure to hit Ctrl-S and watch the backup finish before you close your laptop’s lid. Also, if you’ve just written a significant amount of work, or even if you’ve just written a really fine paragraph, press Ctrl-S and make that backup. It should only take a matter of seconds, unless your project is massive. Get the “backup early & often” habit engrained.
I recommended above that you change setting Retain backup files to Keep all backup files. My rationale is that while you have this flakey PC situation, in the event of a restore, the more backups you have available to you the better. Also, with this setting, you don’t have to concern yourself with Scrivener’s automatic cleanup process removing older backups that you might want to keep. Instead, once a week or once a month or whatever time interval you choose, manually clean up your backup folder by deleting the zipped backups you no longer need to keep.
Hopefully you find some of this useful. Here’s a more detailed post I wrote a while ago on backups. It was written for v1 so the menu paths have changed, but everything else is still applicable.
Best,
Jim