Out of the blue today, Scrivener V2.8 opened OK on my Mac OSX 10.10.1 as usual, but when I tried to load my manuscript it failed and flashed a message: “Loading. Rebuilding indexes. Please wait. Looking for changed files.”
After 20 minutes It never did load, spinning ball kept on - when I hit force quit it showed Scrivener not responding.
I rebooted, made a test document and was able to open it.
But still could not open my manuscript.
The file is large with many images in research folders - 3.64 GB. Too big?
Note: I’ve moved this response over here, please keep the discussion in one thread. Now that I see the total project size, however, it may be it’s just a matter of time. 3+gb is a lot of data for the software to crawl through. It has to scan every text file and PDF, it may take longer than twenty minutes. Original comment to follow, but you can probably disregard unless after a lengthy amount of time it is still hung.
It could be running into a PDF that it can’t extract the text out of, or perhaps one of the RTF files that stores your text has problems (embedded images?). Since this just started happening, you might be able to step back to a version of the project from before you pasted or imported whatever is causing the problem. Since you’ve been unable to work in it, it shouldn’t be too old in terms of content. If you are unsure of how to restore from a backup version, §7.8.4, Restoring from Backups, pg. 66 in the user manual PDF, should be enough to check through these and see if there is a good clean version of the project that is up to date.
But, if the last good copy did already roll off, we can probably help you repair it. It’s usually pretty easy to do.
What would help us figure out what is causing the hang is your crash logs and any console messages you get from Scrivener in that time range of the project loading. You can just send those via e-mail, attn: Ioa, and reference this thread URL.
And yes, I’d say it’s a bit on the large size. You can certainly do it, but the price is this. When stuff like this happens, it can take a lot longer to repair itself, and backup time is greatly increased as well. Those are the main drawbacks, so where to draw the line is a personal decision. I’d recommend taking a look at the File/Import/Research Files as Aliases… command. That will import just a link to the original file instead of embedding it. In every functional way it will act like a normal, fully imported PDF.
You’ll still have a huge search index, but it might make more frequent backups feasible if you pare it down a bit.
Thanks, AmberV,
I actually did just find the last .scriv file that was OK (2 days earlier) and reloaded it OK.
I make “storyboards” with texts and images so I do have quite a few pdfs as well as jpegs in the scrivener research file.
Perhaps I should just put those rather large docs in a desktop folder instead of the Scrivener program?
re: downsizing my file so I won’t run into this problem again:
I tried to drag images from my Scrivener research file to my desktop - no go. I suppose I could just trash them, but it would be nice to save them somehow.
re: File/Import/Research Files as Aliases…
I don’t get how to do it.
When I highlight import on the Scrivener toolbar, that command (as well as web page) is not illuminated.
How would I import a pdf or webpage that way?
Glad to hear you found a backup that opens without rebuilding.
To be clear, this method is only available for non-text material, such as your jpegs and pdf files (at the moment it only accepts file types the editor can view, but that’s a bug, it should accept anything other than text documents, even Excel or Scapple files). So if by storyboarding you mean putting PDF and JPG files into a single text document, then that’s another thing. You can’t export that and then alias it because it is a text document. If you mean storyboarding by putting these things on a corkboard, then what you’re doing is perfectly compatible with using aliases. You’ll see once you get one in. It’s just like a normal PDF.
But coming back to overloaded documents, what you can do is insert images as links, too, using Edit/Insert/Image Linked to File…. Same idea as the aliases, but these are different in that they are direct links. You have to be a little more careful with the original files, using this command. Just keep the file names and locations the same and you’ll be okay. The links will break if you move the files. (You don’t have to worry about that with aliases, but unfortunately there is no such thing as an alias in a text file).
To get material out of a project, select it all, and use File/Export/Files….
It follows the same rules as standard import and web page import. You can’t import non-text items into the Draft folder (or Trash), and all this command does is import aliases to no-text items, so if your Binder highlight isn’t in an appropriate place, the command will disable itself. The regular Import command remains available since it is possible to select .doc files or whatever and those are valid in the Draft.