Yeah, that’s understood, I meant all of this more in a future-tense sense. If this happens again, then we can better look into the sequence of results that may have lead to it happening. I know we can’t this time, because the backup you were making was “yesterday’s copy” so to speak, and thus had the same flaw as “today’s”, so there wouldn’t be any data to help us understand it.
Thank you for sharing the details of your system, Vincent.
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Understood. Thank you, Amber.
Laurie, you’ve gotten a lot of advice, and it doesn’t seem the situation is directly recoverable. The backup advice is surely your protection against any kind of unexpected occurances.
Here’s one more idea. I don’t lay out episodes like you do for clues, etc., but I’ve been trying another program that’s been recently updated, and itself feels very clean. This is Aeon Timeline 3, a big upgrade over previous versions, which you can look over here: https://timeline.app/
It’s got some interesting alternatives for visualizing or otherwise keeping track of structure, which you can see examples of here: https://help.timeline.app/article/153-viewing-your-data. I’d pay particular attention to the Narrative view and how it differs from the Timeline; and also the Subway view could be interesting:
Here’s their try at explaining some different ways one might use it, if you started a project in Aeon, and otherwise afterwards. https://timeline.app/blog/planning-fiction-from-scratch/
You’ll see that it has two-way syncing with Scrivener, which allows creating a full skeleton for a story, as I think you are doing, and then you can also add elements or rearrange them later, with Scrivener keeping up. In the same way, it can take on a Scrivener project you already have.
I’m trying to think how to use it with clues, as I’m not writing mysteries; at least I think not :). I guess those would show up as being found during events, like any other events, and this fits their fundamental idea of things that happen.
And after a little playing, I realized I could use Tags, which become Keywords in Scrivener, to denote Clues. And could use another tag to name them specifically, so you could track a clue that moves or is seen multiply. Filtering on Tags will show just those items in any view of Aeon, while Keyword Search will give you a list of related texts in Scrivener.
I’m working with Aeon a bit slowly, considering whether I want or need this kind of tool for another sort of fiction I work on, so no direct recomment.
But you could get their free trial, which includes among sample projects a layout of a portion of Agatha Christie’s Orient Express – as I recall open for you to put in relationships you want, as this is, I understand by now, how they sensibly see the app used, just noting relationships you’d like to have in view.
If it sounds complicated, it is, a little, but you could judge if a just-what-I-need approach would be a help for you. And there are tools like Relationships which at a level might turn out to be pretty useful too.
I’m just noticing Aeon has its own backups, which work much the same as Scriveners, giving a record of how you’ve been working with its structures. And what it interchanges with Scrivener is kept to just those things which give structuring ability, plus the card titles and synopses, so this keeps things simple enough that one can believe it will be reliable.
One last thing is that Aeon has a very nice iPhone/iPad app. It does need a view scaling (like Zoom in Scrivner), I realized, to let you see as much as possible on a screen on the iPad, a suggestion I’m going to make in their forum.
Hope this wasn’t too much – I was looking for myself also, and anyway, you can see if it attracts you, on your own time of course 
Once again, this isn’t a recommendation, just an exploration…
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Thank you very much for the exploration/recommendation and all the info. I’d been looking for a software that was more timeline-based for outlining - amusingly, the interwebs had recommended Scrivener. (“I already have that - yay!”… two seconds later, my outline went through a blender on puree. Sigh.) Aeon looks promising. Thanks again.
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Thank you for this! I don’t know yet if this is something new since I last was working in Scrivener 1.9Win, or something I had previously overlooked, but I will surely be using it it the future! Exactly what I need. 
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