I reinstalled Scrivener on a new Mac and I lost all my formats. I have full backups on Time Machine. Where can I find them?
Thanks,
Pierre
This FAQ entry, specifically toward the bottom on transferring preferences, will help you find where these kinds of file are. Since your material will be in Time Machine, and assuming that it is synced up with your current user folder so that you can restore from it directly, you could navigate to the correct location as described there, and then invoke Time Machine from that Finder window to locate all of your support materials, such as compile Formats, and restore them into the new user folder.
Otherwise, if it isnāt set up to do that, you would need to navigate to that location in your old user folder on the Time Machine volume in Finder, in a separate window, and copy the files that way from one window to another.
Thank you for your reply, AmberV.
I am going through the back-up Time Machine hard drive but I canāt find anything that pertains to preferences or application support for Scrivener. Can you tell me where I need to look? I am lost.
Best regards,
Pierre
Do you use the version sold by Apple? If you do, its settings will be in a different placeāyou basically want to match the full location that Finder takes you to when you use that command in step 4. It will start with Library/Containers/etc.
Otherwise, Iām not sure as I have no way to check, but you might need to reveal the Library folder in general to see it, if thatās where you are getting stuck. If you press ā§āH in Finder, to navigate Home, then āJ to open the view settings for this folder, look for a checkbox to show the library. That changes whether you can see your main user library folder, but it might change whether you can see it on Time Machine as well.
If it is still hiding after trying those things, there are other things we can do to more manually search the backup drive.
In TimeMachine, I searched in Containers for something that looks like Scrivener and I couldnāt find anything.
Okay, well Iām not sure how to advise you further, as those instructions will always find Scrivenerās resources on a system that has used Scrivener, and the paths that they reveal will always be mirrored by a full disk copy like Time Machine, because they would be located in the same place in the backup as they would in your user folder. So if that same path does not exist on your backup, I guess it never got backed up (which is unusual for Time Machine, which supposedly backs up the entire drive and not just bits and pieces at random).
Folders can be excluded by the user for TimeMachine.
With the privacy settings, yeah thatās true, though it would be pretty out of band for someone to accidentally exclude the ordinarily invisible ~/Library/Containers/com.literatureandlatte.scrivener3/Data/Library/Application Support/Scrivener, or some partial range of that! 
Well, a long shot is a slow trawl of the Time Machine drive itself (since I think Apple still has not created a way to search through directly). I describe doing so in this post. The find command described there would be necessarily different since one is looking for Formats instead of projects, but the rest is all the same:
find /Volumes/TimeMachineDrive -name "*.scrformat" > ~/Desktop/potential_support_folder_locations.txt
As for what āTimeMachineDriveā should be, obviously that should be substituted for whatever name the drive goes by when typing in ls /Volumes as a command.
The same time caution applies, and in fact I would consider not searching the whole drive, but only the latest dated snapshot by adding that part to the path after āTimeMachineDrive/ā. What would take many hours searching your whole Mac could easily take many times over that, when searching through a sea of copies upon copies of it. But itās the sort of thing you can leave running in the background for days without harm or slowdown.
Thank you for your generous effort, AmberV, but I give up. I tried everything with no success. I will rebuild my templates and make sure I create a back-up, in case.
Best regards,
Pierre
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Sorry we couldnāt help find them. Keeping separate backups from Time Machine is a pretty good thing to do. Itās a nice system for what it is, but it never hurts to have more than one copy of things. For the Mac, Carbon Copy Cloner is a nice tool for this. It isnāt free, but it makes difficult things easy to do.
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