My version of Scrivener is up to date - that’s one of the first things I checked when I couldn’t load a file - and I’m running on a PC HP Omen. This is about a 400K word file and it loaded before and then, for no apparent reason, wouldn’t load any more. I checked to see if the file was too large and that didn’t seem to be the problem. But it wouldn’t load.
So I tried this and it worked. I should say that is file was being used to record notes on movies and TV series that I’ve watched so it’s acting more like a data base than a novel or something like that. And I probably should really set it up as a data base and transfer all the information, but that’s a big job. This is what I did to get access to the file again.
First I loaded a small file. Actually it was a test to see if something else was broken. When that worked, with Scrivener and the small file open…
Second I loaded the original file from recent files. It loaded, but didn’t seem to be too happy about it.
Third I split the file up into two separate files, one for the TV series and the other for movies, both in the 200K word range, renamed and saved them. Now I have access to all the information I originally had, it’s just in two files.
I still have to load the small file before I can load the larger one, but I don’t think that’s a problem, necessarily, with Scrivener. I have 6 year old computer that was pretty state of the art at the time with 32GB memory. I think the problem is my computer. While files have gotten larger, my computer memory hasn’t and I think that’s the problem. My computer is starting to struggle loading large files like the Scrivener ones and also programs. I didn’t see this listed anywhere as a solution to a large file not loading, but I think I’m right. I just need a new computer with upgraded processor and more - a lot more - memory.
If anyone else has a better solution, please let me know.
I like Scrivener for a lot of reasons and just started using it to keep track of movies and TV series because it was convenient. This information would be much better in a data base and I do have access to the MS suite of programs. It’s just at this point transferring all the data and setting up a data base would be a lot of work.
Anyway, in case anyone else has trouble loading a file, it might not be Scrivener, but your computer.