I want to cry. I spent the afternoon typing. I walked away for two minutes to get water and when I returned, all of my writing disappeared. No one else is home with me at the moment. I don’t understand what happened. This is my second manuscript with Scrivener and it’s never happened before. I went to writing history and it shows the word count written for today. It references a draft zero. I have no idea what this is. Please help!
Also, the last time I wrote and hit save the word count was at 16K. Now it is showing a word count of 13K.
Well. If a cloud service decides to “save some space” for you and moves files from your local storage into the cloud, leaving just empty placeholders – as far as Scrivener is concerned: It would look like this. Allegedly “empty documents”.
Quit Scrivener and move the project to a local directory. This should download everything, including (hopefully) the latest changes.
You need to ensure Dropbox is set to handle that folder/files as OFFLINE (or whatever the equiv is) so it leaves the field on your local computer. The default is to have them online which is almost guaranteed to lose work at some point.
You can isolate a section of the space as a vault, which allows you to use it as a secure back up facility. This is totally separate from sync across devices.
Whilst in the past they haven’t recommended it’s use with Scriv, in pracice I have not had any problems that couldn’t be put down to shutting down too quickly or otherwise following good practice.
It really won’t work with the iOS version of Scriv since only Dropbox has the api which will enable syncing with a desktop