Unfortunately I find myself in a situation where I am at a total loss as to how to get me out of the hole I find myself in with this software. I cannot find my way to returning to a situation where I can access my work. I deleted my work in progress in error and have tried to reinstate from my backups but in spite of having studied the part of the manual relating to that subject I find myself going round in ever-decreasing circles.
I think it is all a tad too complex for me ergo - could some kind soul spell out in step-by-step how I access my work so that I can turn it into a word file and go back to simpler pastures …
Your automatic backups are probably stored as zipped archives, which means you’ll need to extract the Scrivener project folder from them before you can open and work in the project. You can locate your backups by opening Scrivener (create a new project if necessary) and go to Tools > Options… then click the Backup tab. Click “Open backup folder…” to show your automatic project backups in Windows Explorer. They’ll probably have an icon of a zippered folder, indicating they’re zip files (unless you’ve turned on extensions in Windows Explorer, you won’t see the “.zip” in the filename, so the icon can be helpful here).
To extract the project from the zipped archive, either right-click the zipped folder of the backup you want to restore and choose “Extract All” and choose where you want to save the restored project or navigate into the zipped folder and then drag out the .scriv folder to the location you want to save the project. You can then open the project in Scrivener as normal.
Once you’ve opened the project, you can use File > Compile… and format as “Original” to create a single file out of all the documents in your Draft folder. Choose RTF or DOC as the “Compile For” format to get a file you can open in Word. If you need to extract other files from your project that are not contained in the Draft folder, you can select them in the binder and choose File > Export to save a copy outside of the project.