I was working on a file, when suddenly Scrivener informed me that the source file had moved, and therefore it woud have to CLOSE (?) Scrivener and save individual rtf files (in my case 62 of them) for all my subdocuments? WHAT?!!! I have never seen an application do that before. If you have a file open, you can always do a Save As, even if you have no access to the original source file. For all intents and purposes, Scrivener basically threw away everything I was working on, just because my source file was moved. This is unacceptable.
And yes, I do have a copy of the source file, but it’s at home, and I am far away. Thanks…
Yes, Scrivener works more like a database (loosely speaking) on your drive, than it does a simple file loader that takes the entire data set into RAM and holds it there until you save. This is because the project format is designed to accommodate thousands of files and gigabytes of data.
Tech speak aside, what this means to you is that in most scenarios, the vast majority of your project is not actually loaded. Only the pieces that you have been working on are stored in RAM. As you work, every two seconds of pause will cause the software to save everything you’ve done since the last auto-save to the disk.
So you can see that with these two factors, the project must under all circumstances remain fixed in place. There is no way for Scrivener to know where the project went, and so all it can do at that point is panic, throw an alert and do its best to dump everything in RAM into your Documents folder. There should be a recovery folder there named for the project.
That shouldn’t happen under normal circumstances. Like I say it saves all pending work to the recovery folder in Documents. It would take a pretty jammed up system for that to fail, but I suppose it is possible. You might need to do some Mac cleaning if you can’t save files to Documents.
I’m not sure what you mean by that. How did you open the project in the first place you don’t have the project with you?