I’ve maintained a certain Scriv. file for years — an extensive Research and Bibliography project —but now I can’t open it. I get this error message: The project at “/Users/2025emergencylaptop/Desktop/DESKTOP/Current/Scrivener projects/*M&B RESEARCH & Bibliography-bak1.scriv” seems to be of an older format, but no binder.scrivproj file could be found inside it. It may be missing or corrupt, possibly because of a problem with the device on which it is stored, or because of a synchronisation problem.
Try ctrl-clicking on the project in the Finder and selecting “Show Package Contents”, then look for a file entitled ‘binder.scrivproj’. Ensure it has not been renamed by a backup routine. If it does not exist, try restoring from a backup.
I followed the above but without success. 1) No such binder file, and 2) even if I changed it the project wouldn’t open. I have always made backups, but even the scriv. files on these give me the same error message. What can I do!
Hello. These files that appear with the “.scriv” extension are actually a normal folder. It happens that the MacOS system hides it by default. Scrivener points out that the index file (the most importart file) is missing. This file is necessary to be able to load and organize the other contents. As the program itself indicates, the lack of that file is usually due to a failed or interrupted synchronization process. Do you have compressed backups (.zip, created by Scrivener itself) or saved elsewhere?
If you only have a damaged copy, there is little hope that you will be able to use your project again. However, the documents inside the package are in a format readable by word processors such as Word. In the worst case, you will be able to extract the information document by document and sort it on your own.
Hi Sandra_Gulland. If you use Ctrl+Click on that project and change its file extension from .scriv to .zip, are you then able to double click on the project to unzip it?
I ask because I’ve had some help tickets where the computer had replaced the .zip file extension on some older projects with .scriv. That made Scrivener think that the project was missing its binder, but it was really a mislabeled .zip file.
Changing the extension allowed the computer to then properly unzip the project so the user could open it.
The most common cause of this error is incomplete synchronization. Dropbox (or another service) “helpfully” “optimizes” your disk so that part of the project is stored exclusively on their server, where Scrivener can’t access it.
More information and what to do next can be found here: