Scrivener 3, up to date, MacOS. I’ve been working on a book for several months. Recently, I was revising a page, adding text… it was a great revision…final draft kind of revision. Then I clicked on another binder section and POOF my beautiful revision vanished. Yes, I’ve searched, used “find” … nada.
Any ideas, solutions will be appreciated. Thanks
It’s down to something right in front of you, probably. The only way I’ve ever been able to help in this sort of situation is in a Zoom session.
Is the whole document in question gone? Or is that document showing now as empty? Or are you seeing the document but it is showing now your unrevised text?
How much time has elapsed between making those edits and your discovering the problem? For example, if it did not happen within the same session and you answered my first three questions ‘No. No. Yes.’, then it is just possible that you have inadvertently opened a copy of your project which is not actually your master copy. This often enough happens to people who are in the (inadvisable) habit of opening projects using Apple’s Recents menu item in Scriv.
Regarding your attempt to use Find. Use Project Search, but check your settings on Project Search (atop the binder). It might, for example, be set not to search for text that is in docs in Scrivener’s Trash folder. There are other search settings that could preclude finding it too.
Not to be a downer, but in a recent case that was reported similar to yours the answer was that the text of the doc was selected at the time and the user had almost certainly inadvertently deleted it by accidentally typing something. Sadly, they did not think to Undo at the psychological moment.
One thing to keep in mind is that Scrivener is really not in the habit of deleting documents worth of text on its own. So, something is up!
When you say it vanished, what do you mean? Did the binder item disappear, on the recent edits? And when did you discover this? Immediately upon clicking away, the next time you opened the project, later in the same editing session…?
After searching for quite sometime, I found the 2 pages in “Research” binder section. At that point, the file for this section, placed under the appropriate chapter heading was now gone.
I’m concerned that my Scrivener program is someway corrupted as this sort of thing has been commonplace in last few months. Thus I spend far more time in “repairs” than writing. The backup setting under preferences has a default, which it reverts to, pays no attention to set number to be saved - and the saved backups are “grayed out” in the Finder.
If your backups are saving as .zip files, you have to unzip them before you can open them with Scrivener. That’s likely why they’re appearing as greyed out.
It’s possible that the file was accidentally moved. Moving an item in the binder “under the hood” means actually moving a file from one folder to another in the project’s package contents, so this isn’t something that Scrivener can just do on its own. There are a lot of different ways to move files around, so it’s possible if you keep finding files have been moved that you’re accidentally triggering one of those methods without realizing it.