My MacBook Air (2017 or 2018 - never a good machine) had a catastrophic series of kernel panics and finally died.
I bought a Neo and poured the contents of the old Air into it, but I’m not sure whether the files from the recent backup were damaged. My main research project seemed to have less in its main file than I remembered.
So I renamed that file to its name plus “Neo”, then plugged in the backup drive, and then dragged onto my desktop the version of the research file from a March backup, around three weeks before the crashes. Then I renamed that, adding “test from Glyph” to its name.
But when I try to open it, I get a message saying (I’ve changed the name of the project to X here)
The document “X general test from Glyph.scriv” could not be opened.
Scrivener tried to rename the scrivx file inside “/Users/(me)/ Desktop/X general test from Glyph.scriv” to match the project name but could not. (When moving or copying files, it is possible for the internal scrivx file - a file inside the .scriv package
- to end up with a different name to the main project, which is fine and perfectly valid; Scrivener just renames it the next time the project is opened. In this case your file system is refusing to allow Scrivener to do this, however.) This is most likely caused by a permissions error, or because the media on which this project is stored is not writable.
Try copying the project to your local hard drive and opening from there, and also check that you have the necessary permissions to edit this file. If the problem persists, try restoring from a backup.
How can I open it and check the contents? And is there any way of comparing the two versions of the project safely to see if there are differences?
I’d run through this checklist. Permissions issues are not uncommon when copying data between systems. It could be the project copied over with your old user as the owner, and so the new user account does not have permission to modify the project.
And I’d accidentally downloaded a second version of the same project, but put it in the bin. To put it in the bin, it asked for the system password, and to take it out of the bin it asked for the same; when I took it out I tried to open it, and got the same message.
Yeah it sounds like you definitely do not “own” the file. I don’t know why the checklist isn’t working though, it ordinarily has a perfect record of fixing these kinds of issues. It both makes the project read-write and changes the owner. But maybe macOS 26 is throwing a wrench in things.
Well, unzipping often fixes these problems too. Even if the zip file was saved to a different account or owner, the unzip mechanism resets that. Do you have the original .zip backup you could try unzipping on the new computer (not before and then copying it).
I dragged the file in from a Time Machine backup from March.
Edit: Scrivener is opening other files (the ones that were reinstalled on the computer from an April backup) with no problem. It’s just when I drag a project onto the Desktop from the Time Machine backup on an external hard drive that this problem comes up.
Further edit: the project on the March backup is 75.8MB. The project now on the computer (loaded back in from an April backup) is 75.9MB. So that sounds like it’s probably all right, even if I can’t open it to see the word count on the main research document, or compare the documents… I hope.
Third edit: how can I count the total number of words in a project?
Scrivener by default creates backup copies of the project, and zips them into a single file, every time you close the project. Those should be in your Time Machine as well, though if you’ve never messed with Scrivener’s backup settings, they will be in the old account’s Library folder, under Application Support/Scrivener/Backups.
Time Machine should in theory allocate the file to the user that restores from it, but do make sure you are using the Time Machine interface to do so, not just plugging the drive in and going in directly with Finder. It isn’t recommended to copy files out of it that way (by Apple, that isn’t just a Scrivener thing). You want to navigate to where it is, in Time Machine (with all the stars and sci-fi stuff), and restore it.
See also:
§5.2.3, Restoring from Backups (there is also a section on Time Machine there).
A post with tips on comparing projects. Scroll down to the paragraph beginning, “And so to that end…”, as the top part is a response to the feature request itself. I wouldn’t want to go solely by word counts (via Project ▸ Statistics...) as that could change for a large number of reasons, or even not change for drastic reasons (write 3,000 words, delete 3,000 other words).
Yes, each time I went in through Time Machine and chose a slightly older backup. (Apple helped me as well.)
Giving up for the day; I’ll look for the .zip tomorrow.
However, in looking for the .zip, will that be the latest backup, or will there be a .zip in each Time Machine’s version? What I want to check is the project from March, before the series of crashes happened.
Time Machine will dutifully record each .zip copy made, and preserve versions of them going backward in time. So yes, you should be able to go back to March and restore the five or so copies that Scrivener had maintained at that point in time.
Yes, unless you excluded that folder or its parent folders from TimeMachine backups, or if that folder is empty because you are putting your Scrivener backups into another location.
Try this:
in Finder, navigate to ∼/Library/Application Support/Scrivener/Backups (or the folder you configured Scrivener to store your backups)
See if you have Scrivener backups there. If not, then they are somewhere else or non-non-existant.
Click on the TimeMachine icon in the MenuBar. if that TimeMachine icon not in the Menubar, then add it in Apple Icon → System Settings → Menu Bar, turn on the TimeMachine slide switch. The icon looks like a little clock with two circular arrows around the circumference of the circle.
That will launch TimeMachine landing into that same folder you navigated to in Finder. You can then navigate through TimeMachine past backups.
When I open “Go to folder” and enter “∼/Library/Application Support/Scrivener/Backups” I just get a kind of popping error sound from the computer.
Edit: tried on the computer, actually going in through the path rather than using the “Go” command, and it has various backups going back to 2014, though not as many as I would have expected.
There are two names with the right sort of dates for comparison relating to this particular project, which I’ll call Project:
“Project-bak-2026-04-10T23-26.zip” - with the date given as 10 April 2026 at 23:26
and
“Project-bak3.zip” dated 19 March 2026.
I’m puzzled at there being two different types of backup.
From here, can’t really help any further without looking at your machine.
All I can say is recover these backups that you have found and see if your writing problem fixed.
And … perhaps after getting back in business take a second look at how you have configured Scrivener Backups in Scrivener → File → Settings → Backup Tab. I have mine set to go to ~/backups/scrivener/, as zip files, keeping 25, all options checked-on but no “backup on project open” (I backup only on project close). These zip files are indeed backed up by TimeMachine (and 2 more backup methods).
I read this but I simply can’t understand it. For instance,
Use Project Search in both projects to find everything modified in the past month or so (search for “mdate:>30d”), and then click the little “hook” button in the search results header bar, to load the result over into the main editor. From there you can switch to Outliner mode, and sort by modification date—and now you can easily see which things have changed in both projects, perhaps even independently.
What ‘hook’ button? What is the main editor? What is Outliner View?
There seems to have been an image on that webpage which is now gone - perhaps that might explain?
Is there no simple “How to compare two versions of the same project” document in existence?
The current version of the main document in the main project has 353,191 words, and the version from April (a month before the crashes) has 358,124 words. So not a huge difference.