I’m using Scrivener on Mac 10.13.16. From time to time when I’m using the program, it gives me the beach ball with no warning, and there’s nothing I can do to fix it. Force quitting doesn’t work. I have to shut down all of my programs and then do a hard physical shut down. Why is it happening and how can I fix it?
Do you remember what the last thing you did in your project was before this started happening? It looks like you tried to import something which is corrupt and causes Scrivener to hang.
Also, how many backups do you keep. Hold down the shift key and open Scrivener without opening the corrupt project. If you don’t know where your backups are, in Scrivener go to Scrivener > Preferences > Backup and choose “Open backup folder” Copy (Opt-drag) the backups onto your desktop one by one, unzipping it, and trying to open it. Hopefully you’ve got a backup from before what is causing the hang. If that’s no good …
I would get in touch directly with support@literatureandlatte.com (I think mac.support@… may be an option) and tell them your problem; go to Utilities > Console and look for any crash reports for Scrivener, copy them into TextEdit and save it to attach to your email; also zip up the project and attach that.
I hope you can get sorted, that way. Good luck.
Mark
I don’t know what I was doing because it was mundane—I was typing (maybe I paused, not sure) but all of a sudden, beach ball. I’ll try your suggestions and see what I find. I wonder if it’s a question of an external drive that kicks in.
Hi,
If what I said before doesn’t work, the other thing you might try is with Scrivener closed, from the Finder hold down the Opt key and on the menu bar click Go > Library, there choose Preferences and scroll down until you see com.literatureandlatte.scrivener3.plist and drag that out onto your desktop. Now start Scrivener—it will set a new default set of preferences—and see if the project opens. If it does, you’ll have to reset all your preferences to how they were; if it doesn’t, delete the new preference file created in the library and drag your old one back in.
But I suspect the problem is with a corrupt file in your project, not a corrupted Preferences—that can happen, by the way—so working with the great people at Literature and Latte may well be your best bet.
Mark
Edit: Having read your post again, is your active project stored on an external drive?