I went to open my Scrivener and it came up, then it says not responding. I closed it and reopened to find all of my folders reset to when I had made the Scrivener file months ago and/or disappeared entirely. When I opened backup files of the Scrivener file, they changed to the most recent file (the one without all of my work).
I searched my documents for any other files with the same or similar names that might have been restored or backups. But all I found was the same damaged files. I tried opening the file from another scrivener file, but still the same file.
What do I do?
Where do you store your scrivener files?
How many backups do you make?
Where do you store your backups?
Scrivener does not remember old versions from months ago and open them randomly. It is possible that there was a problem storing or reading from wherever you were storing your files and they are so corrupted scrivener cannot recover much or anything from wherever it is looking.
If you set your backup to backup on closing, and you closed, it would backup whatever you had. In this case nothing. So, you go to the previous backup. I think Scrivener defaults to 10 or 12 backups, but you could be making 20 or more. Just follow the instructions in the manual for using an older previous backup. I have:
auto backup on
backup on close
backup with each manual save
backup before updating mobile devices
compress backups
Retain 10
Also, I backup to a folder called “Backups” making it pretty easy to find and figure out what’s there.
This is not enough to function safely with ANY program. You also need an external backup in another place on another media. So, I backup the backups folder as well as the documents folder with Scrivener files in it and keep multiple versions of the backups as well.