I recently had some technical issues with my Mac computer. Long story short, I took it to Apple and they wiped it and reset the whole thing. I felt confident enough doing this as I have a Time Machine backing up at regular intervals, and of course, my scrivener app backs up to Dropbox. For the last few weeks I’ve done all my writing on my ipad. When I went back to my Mac today to open scrivener and work there, it had not synced with the previous 3 weeks of work on the ipad. I made sure to properly close down my ipad scrivener app every time and saw that it had synced each time I used it. So why doesn’t the latest version of my work show up on the Mac? It shows the last time I used this particular piece of work as sometime in January. I’m terrified to do the wrong thing and have it sync away all the work of the last few weeks, or being left to try to sort through conflict reports to find the right one to keep.
In that scenario I would simply copy the projects directly off of the iPad if they are the most recent version. Since they reset your machine you are probably on 10.15 at this point, so when you plug your iPad into the Mac (or if it is in range if you have it set up to backup/sync over WiFi) it should appear in the Finder sidebar—but if they installed an older version, you would then need to use iTunes for file transfer. From there you can navigate to Scrivener’s storage area and copy the projects straight out to the local disk. Easy.
Verify they are good on the Mac, and if they are, replace the old copies in Dropbox and let the Mac fully upload everything. What I most certainly would not do is try to sync until I’ve got the stuff on the iPad safely copied and backed up and the Mac fully brought back up to date with Dropbox.
Keep in mind that if you restored the machine from an older backup, Dropbox has to bring the entire folder back up to speed on the Mac. It may just be taking a while to do so.