I received this error message while I had the Scrivener project open, but was not working on it.
“Could not save Binder. Error: Could not open binder file. Identity: ‘Scrivener:Folder:Plain’”
Then the location of the file, and advice on how to avoid losing the latest changes. I used SaveAs to save the file elsewhere, but when I opened the original one again, everything seems to be fine, and I haven’t lost any of my work. Can I just ignore this error?
The error message doesn’t indicate that there is a problem with the file or that any content is lost, but it isn’t something to ignore. Scrivener autosaves regularly, and the message indicates that at the time the autosave ran, Scrivener was not able to save changes to the binder file. One cause of this is that some other software on your system had the file locked, preventing Scrivener writing to it, and then later that lock was released and Scrivener was able to save the changes on the next try. It’s likely though that you’ll run into the issue again, if this is your situation, so you’ll want to take a look at what software you have running that might be accessing Scrivener’s files and set it to ignore the location where you store your projects. Other software modifying your project files could cause other problems besides just the temporary save warnings.
Memeo Backup (also called WD Anywhere on Western Digital drives) is known to cause this problem, but check on any backup or syncing software you may be using. If you exclude your Scrivener projects from the files that are regularly backed up, be sure that your automatic backups in Scrivener are saving to a location that is still backed up externally, or that you’re regularly saving your own backups to another drive.
Thank you, I’ll check on other software. I have two backup programs running as I’m paranoid about losing my work (experience!). Maybe that’s overkill.
I definitely understand and support the desire to create regular backups! Like I said, if you do need to exclude your projects from being actively monitored, make sure you’re saving regular backups of the projects to another location that is covered by your other backup software. You can change the location of Scrivener’s automatic backups in Tools > Options (and adjust other settings for the auto-backups as well). You may also be able to increase the auto-save interval in the General options to reduce the likelihood of a conflict between the software without needing to exclude the projects from the backups. I would however in that case still make sure you’re making project backups specifically from within Scrivener and that your backups are complete, in case there’s anything else untoward going on with the software that’s touching the project files–we had a few cases of project corruption a while back that seemed to indicate Carbonite and another online backup service. I can’t think of any recent instances, though.
The culprit is Mozy backup. It doesn’t seem to do more than lock the file for a few minutes, though, no corruption.