Sorry to start a new topic, but searching doesn’t seem to solve the problem.
I was writing (macbook) in the single page view with just the current chapter document open. Somehow, as i was typing fast, the side of my hand must’ve hit the delete key as I reached across it and the whole chapter was gone.
I went to edit, but the undo command was greyed out.
I looked in trash, no text (1500 words gone)
I tried backup, typing in a time 5 minutes before, no change.
after searching the forums, i went to the backup folder in dropbox, but having tried going back the five minutes as above, there isn’t the zip file for this project, like there dis for all my other ones.
I am resigned to having lost this week’s work (sob),
but what do I do to make sure I don’t do it again?
First things first, have you closed the program or project yet? If not, I would try undo again. Go back to the file you were typing in, make sure to click in the editor so the cursor is blinking, and see if Undo is available. If not, it must have been closed (maybe when you checked the backup).
If you can’t undo, do you use Time Machine? You should be able to step back a few hours and further if need be. I would just recover it with the option to keep both, then open them up and keep the better one. The restored one will probably complain that it is already open, just ignore the warning and open it, that just means you were working on it when the snapshot was taken. I can’t think of a better option. It sounds like it hadn’t been backed up for over a week, maybe since it was made. You can double-check to make sure the Dropbox folder is actually where our backups are being saved. In the Backup preference pane, check the “Backup location”. Is that in the Dropbox folder? If you click the button, is that what you saw before? Maybe it got reset at some point and the new backups are elsewhere.
At some point, you should check your back up settings. If you tend to leave the project open for days or weeks on end, it would be good to add the Backup Preference option to Back up with each manual save, if it’s not already. That way you can back up at the end of the day or whenever you feel like it, without having to close it. It’s good to make sure those stay as up to date as you can. That won’t help you now, but will make things safer going forward.
I’ve followed, I think, what you’ve said. I fear I have lost this stuff, but I feel better about things going forward.
I had this naive impression that when the guide said it saved everything every 2 seconds, I was safe.
Obviously, save, back up, and recovering stuff is all different.
Well, I know now.
Also, I thought all deleted text would be saved in the project trash folder. Did I read that wrongly in the tutorial?
I’ll look into Time Machine, I might have to get an external hard drive though, if it needs a lot of memory.
If it was a week’s work and if you have backups turned on, there has to be a recent backup of your text.
Scrivener will – depending on your settings – autosave every few seconds (not backup every few seconds), but if a user deletes all the text in a document, after a few seconds that blank version of the document will be saved. Even then, CMD Z should have been able to undo any accidental deletion of text.
Deleted files are moved to Scrivener’s trash (and are recoverable until the trash is emptied), but text deleted from a document has nowhere to be stored if it is no longer part of a file: this is true of any app on any OS.
Where do you store (1) your working Scrivener files, and (2) your Scrivener backups?
Unfortunately, Id assumed that the autosave was an auto backup.
I only use the macbook for writing, so I rarely close scrivener.
then the auto save had saved the work with the deletion, and when the undo command was greyed out, I’d panicked.
by the time I’d dragged my son out of bed to try and rescue it, it was well gone.
Now I know…
Anyway, by the time I’d had a restorative cuppa, I did quite well on catching up and rewriting while it was still fairly fresh in my mind, and it’s possibly the better for it.