I had an issue back in Nov 2013 with some corrupted RTF files that showed up when I ran the Project Statistics. That got resolved, thanks to help from this forum (thank you!).
Today I opened a Scrivener file and was looking at a document in it and it was all corrupted. Looked just like the ones from before – strange characters, partial information with gibberish.
While I can certainly try and go through the same process as before to see if there’s a clean version somewhere, I am deeply disturbed by this discovery. HOW MANY OTHER PARTS OF MY SCRIVENER DOCUMENTS MIGHT BE CORRUPTED AND I DON’T KNOW IT?
If too much time goes by, the clean version will be overwritten (I don’t keep an infinite number of backups), right?
Is there a way to monitor one’s project for corrupted files? I don’t care if it’s a workaround that requires a little extra effort, I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure my project file is clean every time I use it. Losing data like this is completely unacceptable. Especially when it’s stealthy and I have no clue it’s happening. If I hadn’t viewed that particular file in my massive story notes project, I wouldn’t have had any clue there was something wrong.
Most of the forum threads I’ve read about corrupted files talk about computer crashes or Dropbox or Carbonite backups. When I was originally having an issue, I was saving my Scrivener project to a flash drive (so I could work on it on multiple PCs).
But now I’m just using Scrivener on this laptop and backing up my files manually onto another machine. What in the world could be causing this? Yes, it’s the same project file that had corrupted files back in Nov 2013, so it’s possible that this file has been corrupted since then and I just didn’t notice it.
Regardless, I’m getting to a point where I may need to walk away from Scrivener if I cannot trust it to keep my data safe.
Again, main question of this post is: Is there a way to monitor files and/or scan files to determine whether or not they are corrupt?
If there are any tips on what circumstances cause corrupted files (other than those mentioned above), that’s welcome, too.
Thank you!