I have my work saved on a flash drive with it set to save the 5 most recent backups. While I was working, I went to open a text file within Scrivener that should have had about 1500 words in it. When I clicked on it, the word count at the bottom was correct, but none of my words were showing. Then I clicked on another text document and the same thing happened. When I did it the second time, I realized that about 6 text documents were just suddenly empty when my words had just been there. When I started to scroll down to see how many documents were affected, the document just reloaded, all of my customizations were gone, and every text file was empty. 50,000 just completely gone. So I closed Scrivener and tried to open one of my backup files. They are all exactly the same. All of my backup files, and months of work, are just gone.
Urgent help please, I’m having a panic attack.
Empty files happen when the Index file is intact, but Scrivener cannot access its files. So, did you move the SCRIVX- file without the rest of the Project folder?
When it suddenly happens, other factors may limit Scrivener reaching its files, like anti-virus softÂware or an incomplete sync, or insufficiant rights.
@fredette, I think what Antoni is suggesting is that your actual text, your work, has not gotten lost, but that Scrivener is at the moment not able to access it.
It’s very unlikely Scrivener’s text is actually lost, because it is in individual files within the project folder. So one way or another, you should be able to recover them.
Others will be able to suggest the best way for you to go forward, but I wanted to give you some confidence this is likely to work out.
Hi @kfredette1 , sorry to hear about this trouble. I’m sure that’s very frightening!
First, have you tried moving one of your projects to local storage and then opening them in Scrivener? It could be that the connection with the flash drive is slow, there is a permissions issue, etc. Make sure Scrivener and all projects are closed, drag a project file from the Flash Drive to your computer’s Desktop, then open from there. What are the results? If positive, it may be that it’s time for a new flash drive or a different workflow.
Have you recently installed or do you have any antivirus, malware scan, or file cleanup tools on your computer? We sometimes see these quarantine or “clean up” Scrivener files. You may need to disable these and look at their quarantined files or recently cleaned files and restore those files to where they belong.
You mentioned that you have your work saved on a flash drive and all five backups. Are the live files and backups all being saved to your flash drive? If so, and they’re not in separate folders, there’s a slight chance there’s been an overwrite issue, especially if your backups aren’t saved as ZIP files. We also generally don’t recommend live files and backups being saved all in one place because if your flash drive got lost or died on you, you’d lose all of your Scrivener files in one go.