So I put in about an hour and a half’s worth of work when my PC decided to Blue Screen. It does this from time to time, not strictly a Scrivener thing.
When I opened Scrivener again, all of my work from the evening was gone. And I am suitably mortified by the whole thing because I was comfortably sitting here and trusting in AutoSave and apparently it has failed me. Quite miserably.
I checked the backup files, but of course that only has the previous day’s work. Went into the Project files. Also nothing. I have no snapshots.
I’m quite convinced that there is no way to recover what I lost, but why the heck didn’t AutoSave work?
A while back I had a similar experience as you. In my case it was a Scrivener crash resulting in lost Scrivener work. (Windows Scriv was buggy back then.)
My takeaway from my experience and from that of others on these boards is that Scrivener’s auto-save feature will:
Keep you from accidentally exiting your project without saving
Will not always help you if there is some type of crash, whether it be Scrivener or Windows or even a power failure
That said, what you should do now is review the rtf files in your Scrivener project folder. It is possible that the doc with your work is intact, but the Scrivener index file was corrupted and can no longer see it. If you do find it, then copy/paste it into a new doc in your project.
Going forward, if your PC is prone to crashing, then you may want to take manual backups after you’ve done a significant amount of work. (You can configure Ctl-S to do that.)
Binder documents are saved as numbered RTF files in project folder/files/Docs
After determining which RTF file corresponded to the one with the missing text, in Windows File Explorer, I searched “This PC” to find all windows auto-saved files with names corresponding to the one with the missing text in the Scrivener project’s docs folder…. good luck.
