All right. I’m working on setting up a new project because the previous one somehow got banjaxed. (A WHOLE bunch of chapter just… disappeared. ) Fortunately, I had a copy of most of the chapters in e-form, so I can reconstruct all fifty chapters.
My 11 month old Standard Longhaired Dachshund leaped up and planted a paw on the keyboard and touchpad… and my binder has disappeared. I’m also missing “File” in the ribbon at the top. I note that Master Qi (I should know better than to name a puppy “energy”!) somehow set it to “Editor Only.” But I can’t find what to set it to to get my binder and my notes back.
So in other words you are looking at a Quick Reference window, not the project. I suspect Master Qi mininised your main window and hit the Spacebar, which will load a selected item as a Quick Reference window. You should be able to access it from the main Task Bar.
I held my breath and closed the screwed up window, and yeah, then my project came back up.
Now if I could just figure out what happened to all those missing chapters that is necessitating reconstructing a project. Qi didn’t have anything to do with THAT.
I couldn’t say, there are hundreds of valid ways to get to that point, most of them accidental. The most common within that class would be accidentally loading an old version of the project though—most commonly among those that use “Save As” a lot, and end up with a bunch of copies laying around.
Nope, not a bunch of copies. I do periodically do a “Save As” but I make sure to give it a unique name. As I said, I should be able to reconstruct this, but it’s gonna take a LOT of time to do 50 chapters because of the structure of my project.
Hmm, well the only other common thing I can think of is misplacing the items in the binder. Either using the shortcut that moves things to the trash, or maybe an errant drag and drop. Using Project Search to look for some phrases that should be found within them can help you find their location, via the Navigate ▸ Reveal in Binder command on the search results.
After that, if I’m still having no luck finding things, it’s time to visit the automatic backup folder and look for a recent copy from before they went missing. Details on that can be found within §5.2.3, Restoring from Backups, in the user manual PDF.
Nope, searched the entire binder. Checked trash first. Then checked everything that had any subfiles, because I have inadvertently moved one file under another. It was NOWHERE. And somehow, the backups got turned off when I installed Scrivener on this newer machine so there WERE no backups after the change to the new machine. I ended up having to set up an entirely new project, and then go into the files of the closed project and hand copy each one to the new project. Because the text WAS there. It simply was not showing in the binder.
It was a very long and tedious task. But I salvaged everything and thanked the odd ghods of the Galaxy that Scrivener saves in RTF instead of some proprietary format.
Well, at least you got a chance to turn your backups assuredly on – as you did, right??
I am sure @AmberV can come up with a rough hundred other ways to lose your pages from the binder, but since you seem to say the dachshund didn’t do it, one thought is that your pc hiccuped and lost that essential file in the project where everything is indexed.
And yes, the RTF files are the point making Scrivener something we can really rely on …
I also am doing a manual backup to a Dropbox folder!
I don’t THINK Master Qi (the Dachshund) caused the PC hiccup which could have caused the indexing – the funny thing is, MOST of the index was there once I got the binder back. OTOH, I put nothing past either Qi (Pramada-Koradox Qi To Everything SL) or his sister, Miss Lily (Creekside Iron Fleur-de-Lys SL). They are entirely TOO smart for MY good!
Microsoft DID do some sort of upgrade without warning me (I had stepped away from the computer to snag something), and Scrivener was open. It’s possible that that is when the glitch occurred.
It took me almost three weeks to recover everything, but I did get it back.