I accidentally deleted a folder in my scrivener project and didn’t realize it until a month later. I panicked and ended up finding my folder saved in a backup. I started using the backup (saved as a separate project) and went back to work on the original project but all my files are blank! I am freaking out and have lost a lot of work from over a month. Every file is blank and every backup version is also blank that has my most recent folders. All my folders are still there and named, but there’s no text. Everything’s blank.
Is there anything I can do to retrieve my lost text!!!
Well, I’m using Scrivener 1, so I’m not sure if indeed my files got detached as someone had mentioned in that post? If they did, I’m not really sure what that entails!
No. I was just using backups through Scrivener that it would occasionally do. I have a bad tendency to leave projects open for a long time (but am constantly saving them), is there anyway to go back to previous saves? I guess unlike word, it’s backups that matter more than saves.
Your backups made by Scrivener are your previous saves. Windows does not back up user data such as Scrivener files (Restore Points include only OS files, drivers, and apps – EXE and DLL files).
It is late Sunday night where I live, so perhaps wait for the European world to wake up in about 4 hours and see if someone else has an idea. But I can say, it does not look good unless there is a Scrivener-produced backup that you overlooked.
Are you sure you’re not using the Zipped version of your project? Backups are compressed by default and you have to unzip the using 7-zip for the project to open correctly in Scrivener.
I have definitely unzipped the backup files correctly. All of my folders I created are in there. Some of my most recent text files are in there, but the majority of my documents are blank and empty. Which is weird considering that the folders are there but all my text is just gone.
Did all of this take place on the same computer, or have you transferred the project between computers at any point?
In a Scrivener 1 project, having items present in the Binder but blank is almost always a sign that the .scrivx file – the master index used to build the Binder – does not match the actual contents of the project. The most common way for this to happen is through a synchronization error, but it can also happen if you attempt to email a project without zipping it, if you simply move the .scrivx file, and so on.
And attach one of the problem projects. We can dig around inside and see what’s there.
Are you using any third-party backup or cleanup utilities?
If the problem is that the .scrivx file is wrong, that’s fixable. But if the content files are actually missing, (1) probably something other than Scrivener is involved and (2) there’s nothing there to recover.
So I found a backup of my project that when I open it all my folders that are empty, look like they have text in them for a second, but then they all start vanishing and going blank and empty again.
Is there any explanation as to what that means? Do you think that gives me hope that it’s possible to get my work back?
