Wow, looks like the program blew up and I have lost all the data (thumb drive BU, external HD backup) but I see a BU file that is on in the computer, where Scrivener does the BU. How do I restore from it? It appears to be my only chance of restoring the project.
Thanks
I figured it out and was able to restore the backup. Not sure what happened but the only thing I did was to change the bibliography reference. Am not going to do that again, even if it wasn’t the cause.
For the benefit of others looking at the post…
You can find your backups by going to…
Tools > Options > Backup
Then click on “Open Backup Folder”
This takes you to the zip files. These files are just zipped up copies of your entire project file, so you can copy them to a sensible place on your harddrive, unzip, and you are good to go.
On the lost data problem, that sounds pretty nasty! I’m sure the developers will want to know a few extra details to help get to the bottom of this issue.
- Did you lose any other files on your thumb drive and external HD? It’s pretty odd to my ears that Scrivener would be accessing your native copy of the Scrivener as well as backups stored on two other hardware systems all at the same time… but not the ones on the actual backup folder. Any other lost files might suggest some other cause that you should look into. Some other hardware / software problem, or even a virus?
- Which bibliography program did you try to link to?
- Which bibliography program were you already linked to, if any?
- When the program blew up, was it just Scrivener that went down, or did your whole system freeze / crash?
It’s great news that you were able to restore a backup. Sadly it’s a reality that harddrives and thumbdrives do fail every now and again, so it’s great to know that the default backup safeguard helped here.
On changing your bibliography software, if you do want to try it again (I’m assuming there was a positive reason for moving to a new one) it might give some steer on whether it was coincidence that this was what you were doing at the time or the result of something that the guys at L&L need to prioritize. Just… do it while working on the tutorial file or something like that! Oh, and disconnect your external HD and thumbdrive first as well!
All the other data on the external hard drive and the thumb drive were fine. There were Scrivener back ups that they only contained a few K of data as opposed to the 600K that should have been there. I back up to those drives every few hours, being paranoid about losing data and seeing posts here about it.
I changed the bibliography from none to JabRef 2.7.2 (open source gnu).
Scrivener seemed to be running OK, just had the data missing. All other programs were fine. I seriously doubt a virus because I’m very careful about those and in addition to the anti-virus software (MS Essentials), I run spybot, and Malwarebytes.
I might try switching to the JabRef in a few days when I feel “safe.” 
)
Hmmm.
Can I ask what method you were using to back up to the other drives? Presumably you had previously checked these files (or earlier incarnations of them at least) and they were working ok?
Used back up as…then selected the drive. Yes, I did check to see they did back up but only by file size, I didn’t do any restores. Meaning there would be backups with the proper date and size ~600+K. When things went “south” the latest backups were on the external drives but listed as just a few K. Same with the Scrivener backup on the computer, the latest BU was only a few K…however there was a full back up from a few days ago.
After thinking a bit, it looks like when I did the BU, it only did one file, rather the whole document. I didn’t change anything with my BU procedure.
Clarification. Not 600 K, but 600 meg.