Deep Scrivener fan. Used it for two books. Third book due in two months (!)
I always open my current project by simply going to File --> Recent projects. And there (yay!) it is.
Today, under “Recent Projects,” I accidentally hit the “Clear menu” button.
Four increasingly desperate hours later, and for the life of me I cannot find ANY of my Scriv projects, much less my most recent, most precious one.
I’ve searched my hard-drive for everything ending in, or containing, “.scriv,” or “Scrivener,” etc. I’ve combed through every menu option available within Scrivener. I’ve read a novel’s worth of “forum” questions and answers here.
I have a feeling my question is so basic that perhaps it’s simply never come up before?
But, shameless me, at this point: I’m now just desperate to find my work.
Where–oh, where–within Scrivener, can I find a list of the projects I’ve begun there? What am I missing, please?
Do you perhaps remember the name of any of these projects? You could try running a Spotlight search for a name instead of “.scriv”. I’m not sure about this, but if might be that if you have extensions hidden in the Finder, that search trick might not work. Also, do you usually work on a removable drive? It might be that the drive got disconnected for some reason.
By the way, if you’ve never bothered about where your save your projects before, the default location is just the Documents folder.
Hi, Amber. No, I have no removable drive; everything’s on my beloved MacBook.
Yes, I have poured through my Documents folder, Spotlight-searching for every possible parameter related to this project. (I do know its name, and searched for it, everywhere on my hard-drive. Nothing.)
And, again, you get my question, right? For a few months now, every day, I’ve opened the same project, accessing it via the Recent Projects list. I accidentally cleared that menu. And now I simply can’t find my most recent document. I assume that hitting “Clear Menus” didn’t delete that whole project. In other words, the arrow pointing to the project is gone, but surely the project itself still exists somewhere?
Cuz… yikes. If not, I just lost one serious chunk of my future. (Big agent; big book; much excitement.)
Isn’t there anywhere on the Scrivener menus one can see a list of projects one has ever begun on Scrivener? You know what I mean? Like, I always just assumed the “Recent Projects” list was a shortcut list of (obviously) the most recently projects—each of which, in turn, of course belonged to a full list of all Scrivener projects, period. I assumed that complete list was available via a permanent “All Scrivener Projects”-type list that was accessible from an internal Scriv menu somewhere. (I thought it would be under “Open…”)
But …???
Thanks for your help. What you guys do is amazing.
I found it. Duh. I’ll keep what’s left of my pride by not telling you where it was. Terribly sorry. (And ridiculously relieved.)
But (if you don’t mind), this still does leave me a question.
I’m in Scrivener, right? I’m working away. Before I close the project I’m working on, I hit “Save.” (Or, as I understand it, if it’s been two seconds since I last saved, it’s saved anyway.)
Are you saying that that newly-saved document is then simply shot, as a saved Scriv file, to my Documents folder? Does it simply replace the last one version of that same file that was saved there, or …? It must be, right–or otherwise I’d see 400 copies of the same (slightly altered) saved file there, yes? (And so the wise thing to do, then, would be to somehow route those saved projects to a Scribd folder within my Documents file, so that all my different saved projects wouldn’t simply be scattered willy-nilly throughout my Document file?)
Thanks again. (And feel free not to answer my “Where’s My Saved Project Go, and How?” question, which I’m sure I can figure out. Cuz I’m so smart at this stuff, as you’ve seen. Sigh. Thanks again. I couldn’t be a larger fan of Scrivener; I was, in fact, planning to blog about it just this week. It’s really become a bit of a miracle in my life, seriously. Anyway, thanks again.)
Glad you found it! As you have found, hitting the “Clear Menu” item in the Recent Projects doesn’t delete any projects - it merely removes the memory of those projects having been open (this is how most programs work on OS X - most have a “Recent Documents” menu or such that works like this).
To answer your question, Scrivener auto-saves. When you first create a project, you are asked where to save it (as Ioa says, if you don’t change the default location, that will be the ~/Documents folder). After that, you don’t really need to worry about saving. Scrivener will save if there are changes after two seconds of inactivity, and it will save on close. But you can also hit cmd-S (File > Save) manually. In both instances, it’s the same as hitting Save in any other application - the original .scriv file is updated, a copy isn’t made. (In fact, .scriv files are really repositories - folders full of files - so changed files get saved inside them).
If you want to move files to a location easier to remember, you can just use the Finder to do so. Just make sure the projects aren’t open in Scrivener at the time, then move the .scriv files to whichever folder you prefer in the Finder. (There is no Save As at the moment for certain technical reasons that have been addressed with 2.0, out later in the year, but Save As always leaves a copy lying around anyway and in this case you would want to move them.)
Note also the File > Backup To option, which will just make a backup of the project at a location you specify - this is very useful for peace of mind.
Hope that helps. Many thanks for the kind words - great to hear you like Scrivener and that you’re on your third book in it!