My laptop has this delightful habit of rebooting itself for no good reason, at random. It can go weeks without doing it at all, or do it several times in one day. It’s a PITA.
I was in the middle of writing(obviously, or I wouldn’t be here, asking for help) when it decided to do this. I wasn’t worried, though, because I’ve learnt my lesson from before and keep my Scrivener project files in Dropbox, and I could see out of the corner of my eye that Dropbox was syncing every time I stopped typing. So when my laptop rejoined the land of the living, I reopened the project - and the file I’d been working on is now completely blank. Not even the words that had been there the last time I had it open, prior to today.
I tried opening the .rtf file in the Docs folder, and it asked me what language it was supposed to be(which never bodes well) and produced a page and a half of hash symbols. I went into the most recent backup, and it’s got everything from before today which is better than a kick in the teeth, but still means today’s work is gone.
Anyone got a magic wand they can wave over this so I don’t have to rewrite it?
It sounds like the doc you were working on was corrupted, possibly the laptop crashed prior to a complete upload to DropBox.
But since your project backup is good, you are in good shape, except for that one problem doc.
What you might want to try is, using the DropBox web (browser) interface, go to the Scrivener folder that contains the problem doc, and locate that doc. To the right of it should be three … for more options. Select version history. See if one of the versioned docs contains your missing work.
Hopefully it’s there!
To be on the safe side, you might want to copy the text from the problem doc into your backup project, and then move forward with that, in case something else in the project was corrupted.
You could also switch over to a Mac. Apple has a built in feature called Time Machine that automatically backs up all your work every hour. So at the most you would have only lost an hour’s work. Time Machine has a lot of other powerful capabilities as well - your program suddenly becomes buggy and unstable - revert the program to a time when it was stable, all done with a few clicks of the mouse.