A similar thing just happened to me – my computer’s battery died without warning and when I restarted my computer, the version of my project that opened is a week old. I was able to find .txt copies of some of the files that are missing in the .scriv folder, and I had a compiled version from yesterday, but I still lost a lot of work. I have it set to AutoSave every five seconds, so I don’t know what’s happened. Is there any way to recover what was lost?
(Moderator note: I moved this topic to its own thread since the other one was referring to a different issue, where occasionally project B would open instead of project A, even though project A was the last they had been working on).
Have you checked the last backup that was created by Scrivener? In the Backup panel of Tools/Options... click the button that opens the backup folder. Sort this window by date, and pick the latest copy for this project. Double-click on it to open the Zip file, and then drag and drop the whole folder to your Desktop. Rename the folder to “Recovery.scriv”, and then drill down and double-click on the .scrivx file in that folder. Does this version look more complete? If so close it, then drag the recovery copy wherever you prefer to store your project. Rename the one that was damaged by the power failure to something so you know it’s the old and broken one. I like to append “-DAMAGED.scriv” to the end of the original name, that makes it obvious. Now rename the “Recovery.scriv” folder to whatever you want your main project to be and you should be good to go.
To clarify, are you missing documents in the binder that been added recently (since the last time you closed Scrivener), or are you seeing outdated versions of the text in the editor? If it’s the former, it’s possible that the file that handles the binder listing got corrupted in the crash, so Scrivener has reverted to an older copy of that from before those new document were added, even though the document files themselves still exist in the project. If that’s the case, we can re-import them by moving them out of the project’s .scriv folder and then dragging them into the binder when the project is open. You’ll only want to move out the files that are unlisted in the binder, so if this matches what you’re seeing, we can work through this in more detail to get it fixed.
Documents in the binder are missing, though the .txt files still exist in the project file. At this point I’ve already pulled the missing document’s text from the back up compile I had done and remade them, but I’ll try your advice if this ever happens again.
I will note that my most recent document was in the project folder but was completely blank – just six pages of spaces.