I think I lost two days of work because of a bug. I work as network administrator and have the good habits to use CTRL+S very often but it seems thats not saved me this time.
I usualy always keep my application opened for quick acces. Tonight I did write a couples of thousand of words, saving often as usual. When I did finish I tried to compile my work into PDF, but changed my mind at the last second. I hit the cancel button and “BOOM!!!” the application closed to the desktop whitout any warning or error messages.
When I opened my Scrivner again I saw I lost the last two days of work. I searched a little bit over the internet and found some good pointers.
I checked in the doc folder of the project. No luck there. I opened the backup repertory. That is even worst. The last backup is from the november 1st.
Any sugestion to help me to recover my lots work? I’m pretty mad because even Microsoft Word can give you your lost files back even if you didn’t save.
I was trying Scrivener before buying it. I’m not quite sure I will continue to use it if I realy lost about 8h of work.
I recovered all my files because of my backup software. It takes backups every hour and I lost only about 5 min of work. The RTF files was in the doc folder in the backup but not on the computer anymore after the crash.
I don’t know If I can trust this software anymore. I will think about it.
I strongly recommend you learn Scrivener’s backup system. As Scrivener is an app sitting on top of multiple files–as opposed to one Word or Excel file–CTL+S won’t give you the result you are looking for. Particularly if you never close Scrivener.
I am not sure exactly what happened in your case, but when Scrivener crashes, which very rarely occurs with the latest Windows versions, sometimes the files get corrupted. If that happens, Scrivener’s backup system will give you a working version of your project to fall back to. But because you are not shutting Scrivener down and you are likely using the default backup settings, you are currently not creating regular backups.
Read section 7.11 “Backing Up Your Work” and Appendix B9 “Backup” and B12 “Saving” in the manual. Only a few pages. As a network admin you should be able to grasp the concepts easily.
I have Scrivener configured to create a backup when I open it and when I close it, and when I press CTL+S. But I rarely press CTL+S, because I open and close Scrivener typically on a daily basis, sometimes more frequently, and Scrivener automatically creates backups when I do this.
But RTFM. Don’t let this experience dissuade you, Scrivener is a great tool!
Thanks for the answer and the references into the manual. I understand better the application process after reading this and did make some fine tunning for the backups like you suggested.
From now I will close Scrivener when I finish to write.
Yesterday I was upset because of the crash and the time I lost to solve the problem, but I recognize that Scrivener is a great application. I will continue to use it after setting the backups correctly in the application.
Another things, I may look like a 12yr old kid, but it’s only because my mother thong is french and I’m not completly bilingual.
Anyway, if I may suggest, I would like to have an advanced installation mode where we can setup all thoses things. It makdes no differences to the lambda user but if the option is present during the installation some people could use it. I’ts just a suggestion anyway.
Regarding your suggestion, my personal opinion is that presenting “advanced” options during installation would result in most folks taking the defaults, because if they are truly new Scrivener users they probably won’t fully grasp the implications of the settings. But I will leave that one for the Scrivener tech team to consider.
I work as network administrator and have the good habits to use CTRL+S very often but it seems thats not saved me this time.
