15:16. Still frozen. (Bill Burr was on YT while I did this. Off now to free up wifi.)
15:17. Still frozen. Resync.
15:19. frozen and going backwards. 2 of 83.
Brainwave. Taking project out of scriv folder. Emptying the trash folder in the project. Try again.
Bill Burr back on. Need some diversion.
15:16. Still frozen. (Bill Burr was on YT while I did this. Off now to free up wifi.)
15:17. Still frozen. Resync.
15:19. frozen and going backwards. 2 of 83.
Brainwave. Taking project out of scriv folder. Emptying the trash folder in the project. Try again.
15:24. Syncing project 4. Up to 271/484. Creeping. Wow: 430 of 484 - come on! (Slurp of caffeine.) 442. 450. 455. 460. Stopped.
15:26. 470 - so close! (I need to calm down.) 477. Stopped. Still stopped.
15:27. 481. (Agony) 3 to go. Stopped. 481. No! 482. 2 left. (Caffeine. Scrivener, beautiful as it is, is giving me high blood pressure.)
15:29. 482. Stopped. Just 2. If I knew which files they were, I’d zap them. (But they are probably main body text of the book.)
15:31. Frozen. Let’s resync. I will win this.
15:32. Frozen. 2 to go. Ok. Let’s delete a large section of the project and try again.
Caffeine. Calm. Resync.
15:37. 62 of 65 files. Stopped. Project 4. Come on project 4. What’s the block? Resync.
15:38. 2 of 5. Stopped. Ok. More deletion.
15:39. 16 of 19. Stopped. Surely not more deletion? If only there was a way of seeing which file was blocking. 2 of 5. Frozen.
DISASTER. VERY SINGLE WORD OF THE PROJECT HAS VANISHED. IN EVERY FILE.
Luckily, all the projects were backed up. I’ve found the latest backups. At worst, I’ve lost two day’s work. Even so, that’s about 5,000 words. The backups from today and yesterday are all empty of contents in the documents but retain their binder titles.
Exhausted.
Picture collages?
How about trying to remove them, out of the project, and try anew?
Are you sure that the text is gone? In iOS Scriv “folder” docs don’t show text, only documents, unless you specifically tell them otherwise.
About backups. Unless you did anything inside iOS Scriv and resynced, the projects on your Mac are untouched. You are copying from Mac to Dropbox server to iOS Device, and then from iOS Device to Dropbox server and back to your Mac. So if you think something screw up, turn off WiFi, remove the projects from the Dropbox folder on your Mac, so it doesn’t copy broken projects from the Dropbox server and overwrite your Mac files.
Link, thanks for the reply. Backups worked. Possibly I was syncing from Dropbox before they had properly synced to Dropbox. As you say.
Still stuck on sync though. I’ve tried deleting all pictures from one of the projects. Still no joy. Emailed L and L. He said the same as you.
Make sure that everything on your Mac has been copied to the Dropbox server before moving over to the iOS device.
On your iDevice, if it gets stuck and you press Cancel, it will just stop. If you tap Sync again, Scrivener will check which files it is missing and copy them from the Dropbox server, which might take time if it is a large file. Another idea to test is to break down your project on your Mac into smaller pieces, because each document will be a file of its own.
You can actually check the size of the various files in your Scrivener project. I tap with two fingers on the track pad to get the pop-up menu, choose “Show package content” which makes Finder list all the files hidden in the project. If you then choose the detailed view (size etc) you can sort the files by size and see if there is some really big file. Tap on it and then tap the space bar to show the content. Maybe it’s a very large pdf, or a very large image, several Mb of data?
Now an entire project has vanished from the scrivener folder. All I did was click the sync button. And entire project has disappeared.
I think I’m there. I took everything out of scrivener. I turned everything into Word. Then opened new projects from scriv, put the converted Word material into these. Next, to dropbox/scriv and sync to iOS.
It’s worked.
Images: gone.
Pdf converts: gone.
Lesson: keep basic stuff in sync projects. The more elaborate you get, the more risky it gets.
… only if you have a slow WiFi.
I haven’t lost anything so far.
Turned everything into Word and set up new projects. Syncing fine. Moral: uload pics and pdfs one at a time. Wait, wait, wait for dropbox full sync.
I appreciate your help.
For future reference, you might consider using iTunes and a cable to make the initial transfer to the iOS device. That way Dropbox will only have to synchronize things that have changed.
Katherine
based on my loss of info, and other reports, and half a century of software development experience, i believe there really is a sync problem. too much smoke for there to be no fire. i recommend that the team take a harder look: something is happening, I believe.
Another dumb question, I’m afraid. Supposing dropbox had a catastrophic loss and everything went down. (V v unlikely, I realise.) Would the files in our PC/Mac/iphones terminals still exist? Or would they vanish with a dropbox data wipe?
That would depend on what Dropbox did on their end.
In the best case, they would recognize the problem quickly and immediately disable synchronization. All local copies would continue to exist until Dropbox was able to track down the problem, restore from their own backups, and get back on track.
In the worst case, they wouldn’t realize anything was wrong until they started getting panicked reports from users whose data had vanished.
This is one reason why I don’t recommend using Dropbox (or any similar service) as your only backup. I’m not aware of any catastrophic Dropbox failures of this kind, but there have been situations where one of the computers connected to a user’s account was tampered with and changes propagated to all the copies. (In one case, the user forgot to deauthorize his work computer when he changed jobs. In another, the user’s young son was playing on one system while Scrivener was open on another.)
Katherine
Very interesting. I back up my scrivener projects, that are stored on dropbox to enable syncing, to my iMac. This is set in preferences. I have a shedload of other word/pdfs/excel files on dropbox and manually copy these to the iMac once a week - just in case. I haven’t found a way to automatically backup all dropbox contents - something scrivener seems to have built in. What else do you suggest?
Anything synced to your iMac will be backed up by whatever backup options you have set up for your main hard drive. On my system, for example, my Dropbox folder is backed up to a Time Machine volume as well as off-site via CrashPlan.
Also, Dropbox itself maintains a version history for your files. (See your account settings for more information.) Rebuilding a Scrivener project from Dropbox versions of the individual files would be very difficult because of the complexity of Scrivener’s project format. But recovering a Word or Excel file should be pretty straightforward. (Caveat: I have not personally tried this.)
Katherine
You can tell Time Machine to backup the Dropbox folder on your Mac. That way you always have another fresh copy of your work.
Thanks for your speedy reply. Helpful. I’ve never got Time Machine to work. Too slow wifi. Contact keeps breaking. I rely on a regular manual copy of all my folders into iCloud. (Time Machine doesn’t seem to copy to iCloud - which I think is a strange Apple peculiarity.)