Bought the Windows version a while ago. Just started using it. Windows XP SP3, Scrivener 1.0.3.
Don’t mean to be a jerk or unreasonably critical, but upon review of the bug part of the forum, there do appear to be a fair number of bugs reported, some of which talk about lost data. Yes, yes, I know, backup your data etc.
For me, writing is more painful than bleeding. Losing just an hour of work is unthinkable.
I’m sure MANY of the reported bugs have been fixed by now, but it’s hard to know. In general, as relates to bugs in general, I would like to know which ones are outstanding and how long they’ve been out there, how quick the turnarounds typically are, etc. Gives a sense of stability, you know?
A publicly visible bug tracking list with status would be handy. Is there one and I missed it? Or some other way of knowing which data threatening bugs are still out there that I overlooked?
I bought the program several months ago and have asked questions that still haven’t been answered. I’m not sure how things are prioritized. However, I have never had a problem with data loss FYI
To the best of my knowledge, all known data loss bugs are fixed in the most recent Windows version. Most of the incidents of suspected data loss that I personally have helped people with have been attributable to sources other than Scrivener’s code.
With that said, if losing an hour of work is unthinkable, you should have a backup interval of less than an hour. Plenty of circumstances beyond Scrivener’s control can cause data loss, too. The two most spectacular incidents of data loss in my computer experience were due to a hard drive failure and a catastrophic Word bug.
I don’t think you’ll find many commercial products with public bug lists. Like most commercial products, we prefer to talk about the things Scrivener can do, not the areas where improvement is still needed. On the other hand, announcements of beta versions – like this one: https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/1-1-0-4-beta-released/17345/1 – include lists of fixed bugs. You can assume that these bugs are still present in the release version of the program.
Yaxley, I searched on your username and didn’t find any unanswered questions going back to December. With that said, you should of course feel free to send an email to the Technical Support team at anytime. We try to respond to forum posts, but the forum volume does mean things sometimes get lost. Direct email questions go into our support ticket system and can be handled in a somewhat more organized way.
My unanswered posts were in the fall, just after I bought the program. Obviously I haven’t asked many questions after I saw they weren’t being answered. I did get an answer to a template problem I had and the solutions offered were not tenable.
Not tenable? Your answer to help you received in that post was: “Yep, that makes sense…thanks a lot.”
This was posted as a bug report not as a question, so I suspect it was gratefully added to the list of things to check in the coding by the developers. Are you still seeing this as a problem? If so, what version was it in, and have you tried the latest beta to see if it still occurs?
Steve, I know what you mean on this one! The worst thing for me is that it puts me in such a foul mood that I have to go take a walk or do something else entirely for a while before I can get back into it so I lose even more time!
I’m not in any way connected with L&L, I’m just a “heavy user”. Based on my experience using the software and from my discussions on this forum, yes, I believe your worries are ungrounded. It’s certainly proved itself to be at least as stable on my machine as, for example, MS Word and MS Excel which are two other programmes I use an awful lot.
Of course, as with any software, back ups are essential. Operating system crashes, harddrive failures and all such things do happen. I once had a harddrive die on me whilst I was uploading songs to my iPod. It trashed the iPod data too, meaning I had to re-import 10,000 songs worth of music back to my computer from the CDs. That’s a lot of albums. You had better believe that this changed my approach to backing up!
Scriv actually has a lot of features to help not only prevent data loss, but to also help rectify the occasional situation when human error strikes and you delete something you wish you hadn’t: Autosave, auto backups, [size=85]snapshots, regular compiles to different formats,[/size][size=75] documents need Shift-delete to move to trash, [/size][size=65]trash needs to be deliberately emptied… [/size]
Thanks to everyone who responded. If everyone else feels secure on Scrivener for Windows stability, I don’t see why I can’t, too. Certainly KNOWING the data loss bugs have been fixed is a big thing I was looking for.
Katherine:
Can’t agree with you there. I was a software engineer for 35 years. 5 of the seven outfits I worked for had public lists and one of the two that didn’t only didn’t because it did DOD work, and you can believe there was a list between us and gov’t. Mostly , in my experience, such a thing was implemented with a “known bugs” w/status sticky in a forum.
I’m sorry your company feels this way. It’s YOUR company, and your company is certainly well-loved, as is Scrivener. I hope you won’t be offended when I tell you it’s my position that this is bad policy. Not doing it just because you haven’t gotten around to it is one thing; not doing as policy is another. My position on this point won’t be enough for me to swear off the application because the responses I’ve seen here on data loss bugs have mollified me, if a little grumblingly.
Reading along the user comments near the bottom, you find a grievance from someone named DrTeeth, complaining that the app seems not to be moving forward (“development has stopped”). Later on, Peter R is giving a date for how long ago a previous release was made. NOT good PR for that app. This is probably not an embarrassment they would have to address (assuming the app isn’t genuinely stagnating) if their development/fix activities were more…transparent, and verifiably so.
I’m just saying’…
Katherine, thank you for having taking the time to respond.
