I have been using Scrivener for academic and non-fiction work for many years. I have never lost a single word. But I have just lost a whole morning’s work - critical work that has a deadline in less than an hour. I feel sick: there is just one back-up (I autoback up on project open + close) - so please tell me I can access the autosaves somewhere? Versions going back about an hour?
I save to Dropbox, zipped back-ups elsewhere - will Dropbox have saved versions?
Mac 12.01 Scrivener 3.23
This can be a gut-wrenching experience to feel you have lost your work, especially on a deadline!
How has the work been “lost”? As in, did you close the project, open it, and now the work you did this morning is missing? Did work go missing while the project was open? Are files appearing blank that previously had words? It’s helpful if you can characterize “missing work” so we can help you figure out what may have happened (and therefore how to get it back).
Autosave updates your live file—there isn’t a version history as it sounds like you may be thinking. If your file is saved to Dropbox, you can check the version history through the Dropbox website and see if that’s any help: Version history overview - Dropbox Help
You can also check to make sure your files are available offline in Dropbox. It’s pretty common for work to “disappear” because Dropbox has changed itself to online-only. This doesn’t actually erase your work but does Scrivener unable to load it making those documents appear as blank. To check that, navigate to the Dropbox folder through Finder, locate your project file, and see if there is a checkmark on a green dot next to it. If you have a cloud icon instead, control-click the file and make it available offline. Then open the file again and see if your missing work is there.
Many thanks - reverting to an earlier DropBox version has almost worked. I have the body text itself back but none of the footnote comments. I can live with that, I have them in note form, and the journal editor has given me another 24 hours.
What happened was that I wanted to take the main section and add it to another open Scrivener document. So I ‘Split with Selection as Title’ and dragged it across from one binder to the other. I then checked the place where I had dragged to and found that nothing had been added except the selection title. No text at all. And then when I went back to the original Scrivener document, the whole section was missing. Normally dragging a section across projects drags a copy, so I have no idea what went wrong that I managed to lose the work entirely between two projects.
I had a Scrivener crash two hours previously (before I’d done any writing today) - so I think it’s wise for me to trash my current version of the app and re-install. Will a reinstall pick up the license (I have no idea where it is …).
Many thanks again - I truly appreciate your help.
Did you verify that the text was in the document after doing the split before dragging and dropping? Just wondering if it’s possible that the split function didn’t perform correctly and the text just wasn’t where you were looking for it, because that’s definitely not standard drag and drop behavior!
Did you try doing a project search on either project for the missing text? It’s also possible that it dropped somewhere unexpected.
Often Scrivener will pick up your license key saved to your system, but not always. You can try the lost license recovery system or send support an email if you need us to track down your license key. It’s good to have handy in your records anyway.
I didn’t check - my bad - but I’ve done this hundreds of times (possibly thousands in the past 15 or so years) and never thought to check. I did try a project search for the text: in fact the whole of my Scrivener Research folder is indexed in DevonThink so I did a full search for some unique phrases in that. No luck.
Thanks again for your help is recovering the work, and for the license info.
No problem! You might also want to review your automatic backup settings if you only had one backup. The default is 5, and generally I wouldn’t recommend keeping less than that, especially if you backup on open and close.
My default back-up setting is for 25 - but this was a new document only started this morning - hence the single life-belt. I have now added ‘Back-Up on Manual Save’ in order to increase the safety margin (I still cannot rid myself of the habit of manual saving when I pause for thought …
Did you search the Trash folder in the project? And did you use Scrivener’s Project Search? I love DevonThink, but if it only indexes the Research folder, it won’t find things outside of it.
Do you have any backups outside of Scrivener? In particular, I think Time Machine runs every hour or so by default, so it might have it even if Scrivener’s own backups don’t.
Of course, I was looking for the lost text everywhere in every document I had open at the time. But I meant Devonthink indexed my Scrivener Research Folder (40-odd Scrivener documents) in Dropbox.
Thanks.