In the final stages of completing the first draft of a novel and was horrified to find, whilst doing some more edits tonight, that about a week’s worth of previous edits have inexplicably vanished!
Since last Tuesday I’ve done various edits on various files within the project, as well as splitting up some of the files into smaller ones - this is not on one single session but probably over three sessions. I did more changes tonight and went back to review one of the files near the beginning which I changed last week only to find that none of my edits were there, also checked and the files which I had split were still in one piece rather than several.
I can see no reason why this has happened and haven’t had the problem so far with the BETAs. I tried restoring from Carbonite but couldn’t recover the edited versions of the files so will have to do it all again.
Can you think of any reason this might have happened? I know that Scriv saves as you go along so I can see no way it would have effectively lost a week’s worth of changes?
Very sorry about this! This sounds related to (as you can certainly guess) our top priority bug at the moment. It’s big enough that it has its own bounty. If you can add any feedback or data to that thread it would be most appreciated. Backups probably won’t help in this case, because the files were never saved properly to begin with—all Carbonite has to go on is your disk, and the disk wasn’t up to date.
Whatever the case, until this is resolved I recommend daily backups using the compile feature. Even the standard File menu backup function has been known to not produce the latest edits—it’s impacted by the same bug as it uses the disk state too.
Thanks for letting me know about this. I’ve just taken a quick look at the thread and noticed that one of the things to do before testing is to uninstall previous versions.
I have to say that, at least according to my Add/Remove Programs, there are several versions of Scrivener in existence on my machine. Is it safe enough to remove all of them, then reinstall the latest BETA?
Yes. All your actual work should be stored elsewhere–your Documents folder by default, though you could have chosen another location when you created your projects–so your projects won’t be touched when you remove the program. (If you’re not sure where you saved your work, you can always run a Windows search for “scriv” and then check the file path for your project folders.)
I think for safety’s sake I’m going to export to .doc and finish the draft from there just because I can’t risk another data loss - rewriting a scene is a pain but easy enough to do but going back through and trying to remember small word changes here and there throughout the novel will be next to impossible to do so I think it’s for the best.
Still very happy with Scrivener and will continue to support it when I start on my next novel but for now I’ll move it across to Word to complete it. Will see if I can replicate the saving issue if it can help too.
That’s completely understandable, it’s sickening to lose a lot of work, especially if you don’t know what all you did. I would do the same thing in your shoes as well, and thanks for being so understanding about it and being willing to help in the meantime.
No problem at all, Amber, this is still a BETA product and these things happen. It’s just unfortunate that the issue has only cropped up now after I’d kind of relaxed about backing up and exporting as I did on a far more regular basis to begin with.
Don’t worry though, if and when the novel progresses to publication I’ll still make sure people know that Scrivener helped me to create it.