I’m having a weird issue that just started happening. I’m on a Mac Mini, High Sierra, running Scrivener 3.1.5. I’ve recently been making some default-format changes, creating a new prefs file, etc.–a fact that I don’t know to be relevant to this problem but which seems potentially worth mentioning.
On starting Scrivener, I’m sometimes getting a startup screen asking me to “choose backup folder” then wanting to know if I want to view tutorial, etc. This despite the fact that I already have backup folders chosen, etc., and have been working in this copy of Scrivener for years. Behind that popup, I can see the project I selected to open the app, and while the text/font looks right, the background color in editor has reverted from my custom color to white.
But then, if I force-quite and restart Scrivener, all seems to be well. My formatting and color look right. While this “fix” gets me where I want to be, I’m a little nervous about the error. Any ideas what might be causing it?
Go to the Backup preferences panel in Options. These are your global backup settings. Click on the Open backup folder… button. Are your latest zipped backups there? If so, at least you know the folder is currently set and backups are working correctly.
Also, go to the Backup tab in your Project Settings. This would contain project-specific backup settings if you’ve overridden the global settings inside any projects. If Use custom backup folder is checked, then Click on the Open backup folder… button and confirm all looks good in the folder.
I’m on Windows, so not sure how Mac Scrivener works, but this sounds like a first-time launch of the software, as if from a fresh install. If this kept happening to me on Windows, I’d probably uninstall and reinstall Scrivener to see if that helped. But maybe wait for a Mac person to chime in and see what they say.
Thanks for your helpful note. I explored both of the backup settings you mentioned, and I found that the autoback option had been turned off, looks like about ten days ago. But I didn’t turn it off–at least not intentionally–so maybe something I’ve done in the past few days accidently wiped out that setting. In any case, if I get the “choose backup folder” error on a subsequent startup, I’ll see if that option has again been switched to off… and I’ll return for a part-two discussion. But for now it seems to be OK (I quit and restarted a couple of times with no problems). Thanks again.
Hmm. It just happened again. I started Scrivener by right-clicking the icon in the dock and selecting a recent project. The project opened, then I got the “choose backup foder” error pop-up. I force-quit the application (that’s the only way to get out without actually going through the step of re-choosing a backup folder), restarted, and again things were back to normal. I looked, and the automatic backup I reset yesterday was turned on and pointing to the right directory. Still not sure what could be kicking up that error.