When I try to open a file from my USB drive, the only place this Scrivener exists, it says the project is already open, which is impossible. I realize that somehow the project didn’t finish closing properly when I used it on my laptop. I don’t know how, but it is possible. The “Make a copy” option doesn’t help. Is there anything I can do to recover the file? The only backups I can find are almost a year old and, thus, very out of date.
Welcome to Scrivener Forum.
Others will surely suggest some things, but difficult to debug from here.
What comes to mind first is to copy (not move) the entire Scrivener project from the USB drive to your computer making sure everything gets copied, then try to open that new and fresh copy.
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I’ve done that and nothing seems to be happening. I select the file from the new location and open and Scrivener simply sits there like I just opened it, waiting for me to open something or start something new. 
Well, one option down it seems. Thanks!
I’m on my iPad at the moment, so can’t check, but as you’re on Windows, you can see the whole structure of the project. Somewhere, I think it’s in the Files folder, there’s a user.lock file. When you close Scrivener properly giving it time to do its cleanup before you shut down the computer, it deletes that file. Even more important to give time if you’re sharing your project using a cloud service.
Make a copy of your project for safety, then in one of them, delete the user.lock file and you should be good to go.
N.B. General warning: Only do this if you are locked out of your project and are sure it’s not open on another machine.
Mark
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@CourtneyB This a good idea I should have thought of. Do it to the “copy” you now have on your computer.
Also do ctrl + Alt + Delete and look at Task Manager. Occasionally, will see Scrivener open even when think it is not. You can restart windows explorer as well, to see if frees the project up.
Try if still an issue holding the shift key when clicking on Scrivener.exe file. This will open at the Project template screen. Create a blank project on computer and import the corrupted project to recover.
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Scrivener projects are composed of scores/hundreds of files in root and subfolders. I don’t have Windows to know this, but what is the file extension for the file to “open” for @CourtneyB to use?
@CourtneyB says:
I read that as she shut down her laptop too quickly after quitting Scrivener. That is a classic scenario for being left with the user.lock file in place… my collaborator did it a number of times in the early days of our working with Scrivener.
And yes, the user.lock is in the projectname.scriv > Files folder.
projectname.scrivx inside the projectname.scriv folder.
Mark
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To step back a bit here, @CourtneyB, have you simply tried clicking the Continue button? I see no mention of that solution being posted anywhere, but as stated in the dialogue box, this is perfectly safe to click, and what you should click if you know for certain the project really isn’t open anywhere else.
That deletes the lock file and opens the project, there is rarely any need to go into the project subfolders to hunt down this file by hand!
Most likely there was a crash or ungraceful close the last time you used it, so the file got stuck.
The Make a copy button is for cases where you know it is indeed open, but need to work anyway, so you make a copy and later you merge the two together.
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I never realised that @AmberV! I have always been wary of Continue because I wasn’t sure if it would end up creating conflicts… and no, because I started with Scrivener at it’s launch when there was no manual, I haven’t RTFM’d! 
So I’ve always checked that the project really wasn’t open anywhere else and then deleted the user.lock manually.
Even at 80+ and with 19 years of Scrivener experience, there is always something new to learn!
Mark
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If the project is in a sync folder, and the reason the lock file is there is because of an incomplete sync, then in a certain way you could consider the project still being “open”, because the result of closing it was not allowed to fully save—and yeah, that can cause conflicts depending on how much or little did get saved before the computer lost connection with the sync server.
However, a few conflicts because of something like this isn’t the end of the world. What this dialogue box is more about is an active session being open somewhere else, with two copies trying to change the same source of data independently, and potentially trampling all over each other. That is the real risk—of data loss and potential corruption. Conflicts from bad syncs happen all of the time, because we as humans tend not to pay enough attention to status indicators once you remove the physical cables from the equation, and by and large conflict copies don’t harm anything, their failure state is in adding too much data, not losing data. They just make extra work merging the conflicts, for us.
So when you look at it that way: we merge conflicts that get imported into the binder, or we use the copy button and merge two projects together somehow… one way or the other we pay the price for being too hasty with sync, but letting Scrivener handle sync conflicts isn’t a huge risk, it is, you might almost say, a natural condition with little functional variation. It is very predictable, and in a way it is even easier for us to manage because precisely what conflicted is presented to us in the binder.
But if it’s just on a USB disk, and not syncing, it’s very unlikely to be any of the above.
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@xiamenese the user.lock is there, but when I open the file in Scrivener after I delete it, it reappears.
@AmberV, I have tried that when the option comes up. The same thing happens: the Project Templates screen acts like I’m not trying to open a file.
Normal to recreate the lock file. But when you open the project file on your computer Scrivener still fails? Is that “it” you mention.
With no backups I wonder if there is a way forward.
@GoalieDad, I tried importing both the copy and the original file and I get “Could not open project for import.”
Right. The lock file reappears and the Scrivener fails to open.
Thank you all for your help! I finally found the most recent .bak file! I must have looked right past it. It works! I’m definitely going to be more careful when working on my laptop from now on. Thank you all!!!
Now, before you do much more set up the automatic Scrivener backups. I keep 25 zip copies that get created on close and every save. save to the default location or other on your local drive also set up automated system backups. test them to ensure you know how to restore.