I was compiling my project as a PDF, and Scrivener stopped responding, crashing. I force quit it, and went back into the project. It was completely empty. All the folders there, but no scenes. Nearly 400k words disappeared. Thanks to Scrivener’s automatic backing up and my own religious back up, very little was actually lost once I found the last back-up, but it was terrifying. Scrivener has since been ‘not responding’ a few times since, each occasion forcing a force quit, but the folder hasn’t been empty again.
Has anyone else had this happen? Has my software been corrupted somehow?
I admit I feel a bit burnt and wary, worried that things may not be as secure as I thought.
When a program is force quit, you kind of have to accept that there will be a risk of data loss—especially if you force quit out of an action that involved using the disk in any way. So while extremely unfortunate and regrettable, there probably wasn’t anything we could do to avoid what happened there, since forcefully quitting software will, by definition, break all of its internal safety measures and rules.
The unavoidable stuff aside, you mentioned that crashing has only just started happening, has anything changed on the system recently? One thing I can think of is Apple pushing out 10.9.5 within the past day or two. It might be worth checking all running software for updates and rebooting.