Hello hello fellow Scrivener users and writers ! I have found today a very strange bug occurence in one of my project files.
Let me explain : my first chapter is very short, 160 words. I have many other chapters in that project. I opened today the first chapter to review it, and what did I find, but an addition at the end of about 240 words ?! This is not a text I have written myself !
I have reviewed the added text and in fact, it is a very garbled, very short snippet taken out of my third chapter (text of about 3900 words). To be more precise, the text I found took several parts of sentences from all over the third chapter and put them together to form new sentences.
The result is something akin to what Google Translate would have produced. Except I have never copied the text anywhere and no one has access to my computer.
How could this happen, do you have any idea ?
This was fun to find but I was SO SCARED I had lost parts of my writings (I do double backups regularly, but you never know).
Were you recently editing the third chapter? This sounds like something you might get from repeated use of the Edit → Append Selection to Document command.
Hi Kewms, thanks for your reply ! I have never used that Command, I checked it out for the first time because of your post.
Last edits I made were on files lower in the list, chapters 8 and 9, I haven’t touched the other files since last time I have read them.
And the only app I am using when I’m working with Scrivener is, sometimes, Pages, for simple copy-paste commands on whole texts, not short parts.
That’s why I cannot understand how that could happen. I have a very basic use of Scrivener and the most I can do are links to other texts for reference purposes, or simple edits on fonts.
Edit: I just remembered I have very recently changed the name of the folder which contains all the chapters, but I don’t see how this could touch the first file.
This is much more likely to be a misguided paste operation of some kind than “corruption” by Scrivener. The reason is that Scrivener is dumb: it doesn’t have the kind of macro capability that it would need to do this without user intervention.