I wrote 322 words in the last text called “untitled document” and now the text is gone. I am on Mac. I tried Command Z for undo, but that wasn’t it. Where did those 322 words go? The computer didn’t crash.
I can’t upload screenshots here for some reason.
In my writing history it says -322 words. So, apparently that day I lost 322 words. How can I find them? Thank you.
If you have automatic backups turned on, you might somewhere have a backup of your project with those words still in it. – Depending on your settings and how things sequentially played out.
If you don’t, I recommend that you look into this function for a better future.
Do you have a clipboard history manager ? Where the text could be if you accidentally cut it (as opposed to a straight forward delete).
Is the document itself missing, or only the words that should have been in it ?
If you are missing the document itself, look in the trash bin at the very bottom of the binder.
(“Untitled Document” is just a generic name the software gives documents for which you didn’t specify a name/title yet. A project may have a couple. Hundreds, even. Make sure you are looking at the right one. – A document stops displaying “Untitled Document” as its title once it has content though ; so look through other documents with their title paler than usual, and italicized.)
If you remember a specific/peculiar word you had typed in that part that is now missing, you can use Quick Search to try and locate it.
I tried everything and it’s only the words that are gone. The text document is still there. Luckily I took a screenshot of some of the content. When I was looking at my saved folder, I got this message: Project not in a recommended
save location.
The project “Slaves.scriv” is stored
inside its own automatic backups folder.
This could potentially result in data loss
in the event of an automatic backup
trying to overwrite the current project
file. It is therefore strongly
recommended that you close the project
and move it to a different location.
Ok.
Are you sure you were looking at the right version of your project?
You seem to be currently confusing your backup with your real project…
See if you have more than one project with the name of your current project in the recent project list. (In Scrivener)
Perhaps one of them has your missing words in it.
After which I recommend you check the manual’s section on backups. As I think you are currently highly exposing yourself to unfortunate user error(s).
(I am a Windows user btw. So I can’t help with Mac’s specificities.)
@xiamenese
Yeah I have no idea what caused this but it’s VERY concerning. I’ll have to figure out where to back this up to as it’s in a custom location so that it could communicate with my dropbox. Now I’m going to have to export my work constantly out of fear of losing my work.
Here is where it is backing up now: /Users/anthony/Dropbox/Scrivener02
Some suggestions:
Don’t keep your master copy in the same folder as your backups. This is a no-no.
Set Scrivener prefs to backup on close of project, tell it to zip them, and tell it to put the date in the name of the backup file. All these things will help you not mistake backups for the real thing.
Don’t rely the Recents menu to open projects. Add your frequently used projects to the Favorites menu in Scriv instead and use that.
Scrivener is a very stable, reliable product (I do not work for L&L). You should not be scared of loss. But you do need some basic understandings!
(Sounds like you had inadvertently started editing a backup file and this led to the trouble. Most frequent way people end up doing that: 1) They always rely on the Recents menu to open their pet projects. 2) Somewhere, sometime, they open a project backup for some reason. 3) Later when they want to work in their project again, they hit the Recents menu – but, guess what? – they item at the top of recents is their project backup not their main project file. Habitual creatures that we are, this difference is not noticed, and henceforth the person is working inside a backup project – which eventually gets overwritten with a fresh backup. Something like this might have happened to you. Hence advice (3).
Oh damn. Thank you. Luckily it was only 300 words and I still have about 100 of them from a screenshot.
Please tell me, where should I set my save destination for backups? I’ve been googling it but an answer is hard to find.
Scrivener’s default location for backups is ~/Library/Application Support/Scrivener/Backups.
But you could just hit the Defaults button on the backup settings page (Scrivener > Settings > Backups)
-gr
P.S. Needless to say you should also have a backup strategy for your whole mac – which will give you another layer of data safety.
If you are nervous, you can also increase the number of backups Scrivener keeps of projects before it recyles them.
See Section 5.2 of the Scrivener Manual “Backing Up Your Work”.
I backup to a different location than set as default by Scrivener. I use ~/Backups/Scrivener. Less “buried” and I keep all my backups from apps that give directed locations as subfolders of ~/Backups.
This location is also automatically backed up by my system backups (TimeMachine and other methods to achieve a 3-2-1 backup system).
Thank you everyone. I’m going back to default and going to figure out how to save this to my liking. I can’t use time machine at the moment as I’m travelling and don’t have a portable hard drive at the moment. So I’ll get the backup working, and then make sure my backup is not in the same folder as my local save file. Then I’ll get dropbox synced with the backup, and I’ll probably get Google Drive also synced with my entire laptop. It already is but I don’t have every directory synced (downloads folder for instance as most stuff there I delete later anyway).
If, when get that all going, your active Scrivener project file is in a location that is exposed to a sync service, just make sure that your sync service is not set to store your Scriv projects “remote only” – i.e. where the sync service removes the file from your hard drive, keeps it on its server and delivers it back to you on demand. This doesn’t work with Scrivener projects, because (details aside) the sync service would really only deliver pieces of the project at a time, but Scrivener needs all parts of a project to be present.
