If Scrivener saves every five minutes, why have I lost changes from over 60 minutes of work when Scrivener error quitted?

Apologies, fairly new here. Done a few searches for help, but can’t see where my issue fits in.

When I tried to drag an image into my project as per the video on the website, Scrivener just shut down.

I have been working on some major changes and additions this morning, but upon opening the project again none of these change appear and the version of the project is the same as it was when I first sat down at my Mac two hours ago.

Where might I find the automatic 5 minute saves? Would they have found their way to a different folder? I’m a bit baffled.

The image issue is fairly secondary right now as you can imagine.

Apologies, again. Even if it’s just sending me in the direction of where to find previous timelines of my work and why the 5 minutes saves did not take. I’m still trying to hold in my head all the things Scrivener does and where to find what, even though I’ve done many tutorials - it’s just not sticking, yet. Plus facing the possibility I’ve just to try and remember all those changes and turns of phrase!

No error messages have appeared, so the “Your topic is similar to…” items that appear on the right hand side as I type do not seem to apply here.

I will continue to search in the meantime Many thanks in advance

Replying to myself.

The time on the back up folder changed the third time I looked in the folder and the time what 1 something rather than 11 something, and this is the altered version.

Is this… normal or does my Mac have a poltergeist?

Anyway, all ok now. Now to hunt for the image problem…

Please make sure you understand Scrivener’s automatic saving. I suspect you might not, but if you do understand, apologies.

It’s not an interval (you mention 5 minutes). the setting is for how many seconds of “inactivity”, e.g. no activity on the keyboard or mouse. While you stop to think. While you stand up and stretch. Whatever. Scrivener saves your file into the project. No other place. I have my auto-save set for 2 second which I think is default.

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Many thanks. Yes, I’m getting back ups and auto-saves mixed up, and for some reason got the figure “5” in my head. It may have also come from an introductory video I watched.

OK. FYI, I set my backups to be automatic on open and close. If I want an interim backup while writing (rare), I just close the project which saves everything and then backsup for me.

Keep it simple.

A setting you might appreciate, in the Backup tab, is to create a backup every time you manually save with ⌘S. The shortcut otherwise doesn’t do much other than trigger an auto-save, but this setting will make it so it writes another backup as well. If you use that setting, I also recommend reviewing the other settings—in particular consider increasing how many copies Scrivener keeps around from its default of five. That’s a conservative default for even whenever you close the project (we have to balance defaults against people with huge projects and not wanting to flood the drive with hundreds of gigabytes of backups), but if you’re going to do this now and then throughout the day, you’ll definitely want more than one or two day’s worth.

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In addition to Scrivener’s automatic backups, you should have some sort of system-level backup.

IMO, all Mac users should take advantage of Apple’s Time Machine tool. Easy to set up, automatic, almost idiot proof. How many backups it will hold depends on the size of the drive you’re using, but “months” and “years” are typical values.

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There’s also the File → Backup → Backup Now command. And for “milestone” backups I use File → Backup → Backup To to create a backup outside of the automatic backup folder. (Typically in the master folder for the project.)

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