Found another! I had a mess of text. I highlighted text and chose: Split with Selection as Title. Realized I didn’t want that, so I hit Edit>Undo (and re-tested with Ctrl+Z) and the split text disappeared, leaving behind the new document and title, but no text. No text there nor in the original. Which means everything I split is now in the nether. Gone. Weeping. Gnashing of teeth.
That doesn’t happen if you immediately paste in the original document, but if you don’t do that right away then there is no Ctrl+V function and you’re lost.
Does Ctrl-Y to redo not work for you? I could undo the stuff that was going on to make the split document (and I agree, that should not be in the undo stack), but I could also redo it back to the original state.
I’ve alerted Lee. I was able to get this with either split command but only when using “Undo” twice in the new document–first “Undo” didn’t do anything at all.
If this is older text (typed before you last closed the project) you should be able to restore it from an automatic backup or, less prettily, from the search.indexes file in the project folder.
Does Ctrl+Z several times work? Sometimes what is one action (split document and put the text in the new document) is actually multiple actions (1. Cut text. 2. Create new document. 3. Add text to new document). Sometimes (this based on my experience in other programs, I’ll have to try it out in Scrivener) you have to Ctrl+Z several times to back up through each of those three steps, even though the program carried it all out as one step before for you.
andygrunt - No, this one’s different, the merge bug was fixed!
Dretzle - No, it’s not possible to undo a split (you just need to merge them), and it’s actually a repeated “Undo” here that causes the text to disappear. “Redo” does restore the text, but if you’ve done too much else in between then there’s a point where that stops being possible.
I appear to have had Scrivener do something like this to me last night.
The interesting part is how it recovered.
I was copying from a Scrivening to another application (a palm note-taker). Then I noticed the scrivening had become blank. Control-Z didn’t fix it, and the undo menu didn’t offer anything by the time I looked at that after trying keys.
By covering and then uncovering the Scrivener window, the text reappeared. Thus this was really or had become a pane update problem.
It could just be my laptop after being on a while and slept a number of times, but thought I’d mention the experience for Lee and crew in case it turns out to have to do with what you guys are experiencing here.
Oh my god. Yes, this really needs to be addressed. I use ctrl z like I use the backspace key, except moreso. I seriously opend Project Targets and the Session word count was -2383. That’s half of how many words I lost. I’m so glad I did a compile first, because if I didn’t most of my work would have been lost. I don’t think I can use Scrivener until this is fixed.
This happened in at least five documents in two separate folders, but all the documents were in consecutive order.
I compiled at a strangely early point because it’s NaNoWriMo and the last time I participated, you had to copy all the text and put it in the word counter. Now you just change the number.
This happened again and again, even after I copied and pasted my scenes back in, they disappeared again.
After closing Scrivener with all the scenes intact, I reopened it, and must have done something to get rid of all my scene’s text.
I’m currently using a trial version of Scrivener which I downloaded yesterday.
THIS IS BAD!!!
Bardie - your issue actually seems more like another issue that’s been popping up recently than the one in the original post.
Try searching for some of the missing text in the search bar in the top right corner. Sometimes Scrivener’s index file gets muddled and telling it to look again sometimes sorts it out quite handily.
If that fails, navigate to the .scrivx folder in Windows Explorer and open it, then go to Files > Docs. Inside will be a list of numbered rtf files. These are your documents from inside Scrivener. Check to see if they have content. (If not, check your backups, which Scrivener automatically creates every time you exit or hit save.)
Does this problem happen just in one project or in multiple? If you create a new project and copy/paste text into it, does that disappear as well? From what I’ve seen with other people posting to the forum, this tends to be a project specific bug.
Bardie - I’m very sorry to hear you’re having problems. This sounds like something different than the earlier posts in this thread. The Undo bug described here was fixed a while ago and was specific to using the Documents > Split command and then immediately using Ctrl-Z several times. Just regularly using “Undo” to delete recent changes has never been an issue.
Additional details on the exact steps you’re taking and what precisely is going missing and when would be helpful in sorting this out. One thing to be careful of up front is that you never move or rename the project’s .scriv folder on your drive (or any of its parent folders) while the project is open in Scrivener. That can cause partial copies of the project to get saved on your computer, which means text is usually recoverable, but it requires some work to gather all the files back to the proper locations. In addition to temporalranger’s suggestion of trying the Scrivener project search, you can also try looking for some of the text content in the Windows search; that may discover some of the project’s text files in another location.
Synchronization tools are another one to watch out for, if you’re working with your project stored in Dropbox or SkyDrive or such. Incomplete syncs can cause files to be missing or out-dated.
That’s half of how many words I lost. I’m so glad I did a compile first, because if I didn’t most of my work would have been lost. I don’t think I can use Scrivener until this is fixed. 