Hi Jane,
This sounds a little like what’s happened to some people with the tutorial projet, although it starts that way for them (at least from the point of creating a copy of the project to work in); unfortunately I still haven’t managed to figure out precisely what’s going on there or how it’s happening, but essentially the .scrivx file that organizes all the documents in the binder and contains the meta-data (label, status, etc.) and status gets out of sync with the document files themselves, so the items are placed in the wrong order, given the wrong name, and so on. Your backup is probably fine, and we can open a copy of that to check; since you have a recent one, that’s probably the easiest way to get back to a working version, as I suspect fixing the current one will involve some poking and prodding at the .scrivx file and the files within your project to get them sorted. If you’d like to send a copy of the current disordered project to support AT literatureandlatte DOT com, I can take a look and see better what’s gone on there and if we can get it cleaned up; with the project closed, just right-click the .scriv file and choose “Send to / Compressed (zipped) file” and then attach that to your email (if it’s 20MB or under). The project will of course be kept confidential and deleted once I’ve had a chance to look at it and, hopefully, send you a restored version.
Are you keeping your project in a Dropbox folder or similar sync service? That’s the one thing I know that causes problems similar to this–basically, if you’re syncing between computers and open the project when not all the contents are updated, you can end up with conflicted versions of files in the Dropbox folder and start to see things getting out of place or going missing. Everything in that case is probably stored in an older version of the file on Dropbox, but it may require a little work to sort through and restore what you need. If you are doing something like this–which is generally safe, provided you follow a few basic guidelines–be sure to read the chapter in the user manual on “Scrivener Everywhere”, as it marks out some instructions for how to keep your project safe.
So finally, to open your backup, if you saved it as a .zip file, you’ll need to navigate in Explorer to your backup location (you could probably search for “scriv.zip” if you don’t remember where you’ve been putting them), choose the file you want–presumably the most recent timestamp; you can also sort them in Explorer by date–then right-click on it and choose “Extract All”. You’ll need to put in a name for the folder Windows will create to dump your extracted files, and then wait a minute while it copies the files there. In that new folder you’ll find a a .scriv folder with your project’s name, and you can move that to wherever you want on your drive and then open it and double-click the project.scrivx file inside to open it. (Before you open it, I recommend either renaming the .scriv folder or renaming the folder of your other version, the one that’s gotten messed up, just to avoid confusion; e.g. you might keep the version extracted from the backup as “Project.scriv” and name the other one “CORRUPTProject.scriv”.)
If you didn’t backup as zip, then you can skip all the bits about extraction, of course; I recommend making a copy of the backup to move to wherever you want to keep it (and to rename if you wish) so that you still have a safe copy of the backup moving forward.
Oh well…