Long Load Reassurance

Scrivener
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I think I know the answer to my question but am seeking a bit of confirmation. I have a project with quite a bit of media in it.. plus about 650k words. Yesterday I decided to go nuts categorising themes throughout the project in a desperate attempt to regain some control. This morning it is not loading but in Task Manager I do have CPU and RAM activity although no swapping to disk. My assumption is that although I have been waiting for over an hour, the busy CPU tells me it has not hung up and will likely load eventually. I should add that by today’s standards my PC is steam driven but before yesterday the app was humming along. Thoughts, suggestions and reassurance appreciated. Michael

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Before your extensive changes, did you make a backup of the project?

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After two hours I was unable to open the file either by launching the app or opening from the file location. What I did do was open up from another project location and then opened my project from inside Scrivener. I am hoping that when I save it I will be able to open it normally but I am checking everything at the moment and tbh I am loathe to shut it down. Anyway. This may help someone else down the track so I thought I would report back.

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Jim, Thanks for the reply. Yes I did backup and neither would launch. Additionally, I use AOMEI and do an automated incremental backup every day. After each backup it shuts the PC down… reasonable assumption that I had another backup, only I didn’t. When I went in to check I found that my files had not been backed up in a month. You can imagine that my heart sank. The backup scheme, my lifetime licence code had all failed silently - I had no reason to suspect it wasn’t working and now I am wondering if there is some connection to what appears to be a corruption. Anyhow, I managed to open my Scrivener backup by launching another project first and then opening from inside the application. I am now checking everything carefully before saving again. Hopefully it will restart normally next time but tbh I am loathe to shut it down…yikes!

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There are four things you don’t mention if your experience is to be of any help to others, or for other members of the community to help you:

  1. What version of Windows you are using (I presume Windows as you say “PC”);
  2. What version of Scrivener you have installed;
  3. The location from which you were having the opening problem… particularly if it was a cloud service and whether it was set to “Keep available offline” (or whatever term is used by the cloud service) or not;
  4. The location from which you succeeded in opening it… for instance if you moved it from a cloud service onto a non-sync’ed location on your internal disk.

:slight_smile:
Mark

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Mark, fair point. I am using Windows 10 and my Scrivener Version: 3.1.6.0 (2862669) 64-bit. I keep Scrivener offline. My attempts to launch the application failed because this project was hanging up. I managed to launch a different project without problem, so I shut down and tried again, but no dice. Next I opened up the smallest project I have … effectively a couple of pages of brainstorming and then once inside the application I navigated to the file and it launched. Quite why that worked I really don’t know but I have a vague memory of doing something similar a few years ago with a different project. Michael

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I hope my message didn’t come accross as aggressive. It’s just that the more information you can give, the easier it is for us to home in or where the problem might lie.

As for your particular problem, as:

(a) cloud services—which are often involved in such no-open matters—were not part of it;
and (b) being a Mac-user, I am less familiar with Windows issues;

I can’t really comment on why your solution worked, but I’m happy for you that it has.

That said, for trouble-shooting such issues, one suggestion is to open a new blank project and try importing the non-opening one into it, as that it seems can clear interface glitches.

:slight_smile:
Mark

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It’s fine, I did not pick up on any aggression Mark, and thought you made a fair comment. Given I was asking for help I should have done a better job of explaining the fix. I assume that by using a different project to launch Scrivener first, the start up issue with the file itself is somehow bypassed. I will keep your solution in mind because it sounds like it’s doing the same job, but putting it all inside a fresh package. I am yet to shut down and relaunch this project, so may have to resort to that yet. Thanks again. Michael