I’m very sorry if Im annoying. My trial expired, and at first I could see my work underneath the pop up message. Now, only “Videos-Scrivener” shows up at the top, and all the icons seem blank, and so does the first chapter of my novel. I can read 0/3,000 characters beneath the pop up message where before I had over 5k.
Did Scrivener delete my novel? I didn’t export it anywhere else since I wanted to buy when I was able, but now I’m afraid even if I buy the software, my novel won’t be there anymore. Can anyone help? Please. I just want to know if my 40k+ words are still there. I won’t be able to buy until the 2nd of January.
It should still be there, unless something unusual/unlikely (unrelated to Scrivener) has happened.
As verification, use My Computer or Windows Explorer (File Explorer) and navigate to the location where you told Scrivener to create the project. You should see a project folder there with the name you assigned (and .scriv as a file type, if you have Windows set to display file types). Inside the folder, you should see a project file (.scrivx file type) and some sub-folders. One of them (I’m away from my PC and don’t remember… Docs or Files perhaps) will contain one or more (likely several) .rtf files that contain your text (and another file type that I forget). Those .rtf files can be opened in WordPad, Word, etc… but probably shouldn’t (if do, don’t change or save any changes).
Worst case, one could use WordPad, Word, etc. to retrieve the text from the .rtf files.
P.S. Also, be sure to get a regular backup procedure going, in which you regularly backup the project to off-the-PC locations (DropBox, USB thumb/flash drive, CD/DVD, etc.). And periodically test and assure that can actually retrieve projects from such backups. There are various approaches to this. Personally, I create and work on projects on the PC’s internal hard drive (main drive), then backup to DropBox (free up to 2GB?), USB thumb/flash drive and CD/DVD. File > Back Up > Back Up To (with compress to zip option) is handy for this. Compressed (zipped) backups are nice for the simplicity of having an entire project folder (collection of subfolders and files) reduced to a single smaller physical file that takes less space and makes copying/syncing easier and safer… the catch being that one then has to decompress (unzip/extract) such back into folder form before can work on it again in Scrivener in the event that one is recovering from a backup.