Having used and raved about scrivener for two weeks, created three projects and been very productive, i wake this morning to find all of my files EMPTY.
all gone. Weeks of work.
WWHAT CAN I DO???
I have read some of the posts, looked in the backup files… there are only empty shells. Few of the folders I created, and even those are empty.
I just closed my laptop when I when to bed last night, and when I woke up it had closed and on opening showed an error message that Scrivener had unexpectedly quit … and then… empty files.
If the back up works on closing, surely a ‘quit’ is a closure and it should have backed up?
Clearly I have erred in not closing Scrivener regularly, but I didn’t know that was necessary.
I am a new user and if backup was a problem, i do feel this should have been urgently signalled in getting started.
Please help!
Since the problem seems to have vanished, it’s difficult to say what happened. When I see “files have vanished” type reports, it’s nearly always a Dropbox-style glitch where some external sync software has scrambled the internal files and confused Scrivener. However when that happens the cause is not the sort of thing that would spontaneously repair itself after a reboot. The files are literally mixed up and misnamed (and can be unscrambled rather easily, fortunately, but it takes a human going in and doing that by hand, not a reboot). This speaks more of some temporary memory glitch. Maybe the files looked empty, but they weren’t really, because the editor was broken and couldn’t display the text—something along those lines—the fact that it crashed after you noticed the problem certainly suggests something had gone terribly haywire and you can’t really trust what you see until that condition is resolved.
Whatever the case, a few tips for going forward:
The default settings do indeed assume you’ll be periodically shutting down your computer or closing and loading things as you use them rather than leaving stuff open for weeks on end. There is of course nothing wrong with doing that. I do it myself, I leave projects open for a very long time, and tend to just sleep the computer rather than rebooting it. But I am mindful of the fact that this doesn’t generate backups frequently, and have changed my settings to accommodate for that.
Backup settings are in their own tab in the Preferences pane. If you go there you’ll find an option, Back up with each manual save. Now when you hit Cmd-S, a full copy of the project will be created in the condition it is currently. You may want to review the other options as well. I like to use date stamps on the backups, and I also like to increase the number of saved backups to 25, that is especially important if you feel the need to make several backups per day (and when I’m particularly busy in a project, I definitely do that).
But while on the topic of saving, try not to think of Cmd-S that way in Scrivener. It’s less like Word and more like OneNote, if you’ve ever used that, or maybe Evernote (sans the whole needing to be hooked up to the Internet thing). I mean to say that when you pause of a couple of seconds, everything saves automatically, virtually instantaneously. 99.99% of the time when you press Cmd-S, the computer has already done it and it doesn’t really do all of that much if anything at all—however if you set it up like I do, so that it makes a backup, then it does, and it’s almost a bit more like using “Save As” repeatedly (except without the confusing trail of versions littered all over the place!).
It’s a personal opinion, but I’d suggest using the File/Back Up/Back Up To… command instead of Save As, mainly because that creates a copy on the disk where you choose just like Save As, but you keep working in the same spot on the disk, rather than moving to a new spot. It’s a subtle difference, but I like keeping things clean and straight-forward like that on my system. There is one single .scriv project and then lots of external backups I never touch unless I need to. I thus never have any confusion over which is the latest version of the project. But if you are accustomed to using Save As from other programs, and know how manage that so things don’t get confusing, go for it. For myself, I use the Back Up To command so much more than Save As that I’ve customised the Shift-Cmd-S shortcut to trigger the backup command instead of Save As.
One important thing: make sure you back up to something that you don’t keep in the same place as computer (i.e. not Time Machine, though it’s good to have that too!). This can be as simple as a keychain USB drive that you always keep with you, or an online backup service (in fact, some people configure their Scrivener backup folder to be in a place like a Dropbox folder, which means every time you back up, a copy is uploaded to the web and distributed to all computers attached to that account). No amount of copies on your computer will save you if the hard drive crashes or there is a flood. That’s obviously not Scrivener-specific, but I’ve personally had to resort to restoring from an “off site” backup like this in the past, and I am sure glad I took the time to set up a procedure for doing so.
A forum regular here recently wrote a blog article about backing up and Scrivener. There are some good tips there.
Fellow Scrivener user here. I would also like to suggest that you not let your scary experience make you overly anxious about the safety of your projects. Scrivener for Mac is a very mature and very stable application and in truth the way Scrivener works it is highly unlikely that it would actually suddenly zero the contents of your project – though I understand that you had a frightening experience where you feared that it had (because it looked that way).
Scrivener’s auto-save feature is great and should relieve your mind that your work is regularly being written to disk for safety (without you lifting a finger).
Scrivener’s “back up on close” and “back up on manual save” are great also and trouble free. I like to have it make zipped backups – which just seem more back-uppy. Like preserved in shrink-wrap.
Backing up all your stuff to an external drive periodically is just good policy – nothing to do with Scrivener.
I have been using Scrivener for many years now and I have every trust in its stability. It is a rare day that I am not running and using Scrivener. I think there are many others here who would tell you the same.
I just wouldn’t like to think that some computer hiccup early-on set you up for being nervous when you used Scrivener. It is an awesome program – just like you were telling your friends – and I think you should feel comfortable using it.