Symptom: Opened a file this morning and found that the Label and Status Lists had been reset to default values. All the additional labels I previously added had been removed.
In addition the setting from the view menu that colored icons with the color of the label, which was previously set, had been removed.
After adding back labels and checking the menu item everything seems to work as expected.
I wonder if anyone else has experienced this problem?
The only thing that was done to the file after it was last closed involved a couple of sync’s with Aeon Timeline.
The main thing I can think of that would cause this is some kind of synchronisation error. Do you work on this project using more than one machine, using an intermediary to keep the two versions of the project up to date? Dropbox would be a common example, but really anything that might end up forking a project’s internal component files to protect from conflicts, could also cause problems like this.
An easy way to check, if you think that might be a problem, is to locate the project in Finder and right-click on it, selecting Show Package Contents from the contextual menu. Do you see multiple versions of the “scrivx” project file in the project’s root folder? You should only have one, but a sync program may create a second, if two computers registered modifications for the same sync event. In that case, you may have your labels in version A of the binder file (where labels are stored) while version B of your binder file does not have them.
Update: I have double-checked whether Aeon messes with labels, and it does not—it uses its own internal labelling system (which it displays in Scrivener using a custom field, not the main Label field). So it shouldn’t be touching the label settings in the project file; doesn’t mean it isn’t of course, but I have yet to see a condition that causes it to break labels.
All right, glad it wasn’t a conflict, those can be messy to clean up.
Two different files are required to store the data you noted going missing:
Label tint: in the Settings/ui.plist file.
Labels and Status themselves: in the .scrivx file.
So for both of these to revert, on a single machine, it would have to mean some kind of global save problem that somehow wasn’t detected by Scrivener. That’s unusual, it has a lot of safeguards against cases where it cannot write changes you’ve made since the last save, but there are a few obscure conditions that may cause that to happen without any notice, and having recent changes lost.
Were any other files impacted—edits made to content, outline items that you added that are no longer there? It’s likely the whole project is “old” if two distinct files are old as well.
Do keep an eye on it, and for a while, I would recommend using the File/Back Up/Back Up To… command to make date-stamped copies of the project in a separate location, at the end of the day or just whenever you feel like you’ve done enough work that you wouldn’t want to lose it. If something like this happens again, you can then drop back to a fairly recent copy of the project and replace your main copy with that backup (I suggest removing teh date stamp when copying, so as to avoid confusions in the future).