Hi, folks.
I am feeling rather foolish. I was working on worldbuilding background in Composition mode. Somehow I lost the larger portion of my work. Is there anything in Scrivner that allows one to recover lost text? And sadly, no - I didn’t save it.
Automatic backups on project close may contain the text you seem to have lost. Look in Options/Settings > Backups for the location of those backups. Unzip the latest backup before opening it in Scrivener.
Scrivener also Saves automatically every two seconds of inactivity. How did you lose your writing?
Thanks for your reply. I appreciate your time. In answer to your question, I was reading through what I had written and, unconciously, clicked on my mouse. Suddenly all I had was the last bit… frustrating end to four hours straight writing. I have been searching my computer, including one drive… so far nada. I will try your suggestion as well then…I may back off for awhile and start afresh. Maybe my brain has a back-up log…
Was the project stored in a directory that is part of a cloud service (you mentioned one drive in your last post)? If so, set the directory that contains the project to be stored locally (or whatever incantation your cloud service uses) and see if that brings the data back.
Did you search inside the project itself? Sometimes mysteriously vanishing text means that (1) you split the document in two parts; (2) you inadvertently moved a document; or (3) you accidentally sent the document to the trash. Any of those situations is easily fixable.
If the project is stored with a cloud service, you might also check to see what sorts of version history they offer, if any.
Has the project been open this whole time? If so, I don’t see any mention that you tried the most basic recovery option available to most software: Undo. Make sure to visit the document that had the text, click into the text editor (since different areas of the window may have different undo records), and try it there. Scrivener stores undo records for each item individually, meaning you can nuke one section on accident five hours ago, after having made edits to 15 other sections, realise your mistake and undo it in one move.
But if you close the project that protection is gone.
Also do a project search by Mdate( ie modified date. Select for 1-2 days and this will show all recently changed files and hopefully your recent text. Not at computer but try mdate:>1d or mdate:<1d forget which should work.