I am experiencing serious problems with the version 3 update. I was running Scrivener 2 on my Mac OS and the iOS app on my iPad Pro before upgrading. I use it primarily for writing my dissertation. I store many images and text in the project file. Before the update it was 120 MB and now it is 40 MB. I would estimate that 1/3 of my text is missing after the upgrade. The files within the project remain, but many are now blank. And all of the cover images were removed.
Fortunately, I backed up the file several times before the update and have older versions saved. However, I cannot open the old files even after re-downloading the older Scrivener software and am met every time with the prompt that a newer version of the file has been opened and it is no longer accessible.
As a side note directed at the Literature and Latte Technical Support staff, I sent an email to support one week ago requesting help and still have not received a response.
If you open a v2 version of the project in v3 it saves the v2 version under a slightly revised name (the word Backup is added to the name) in your designated backup folder (the one you define in Preferences) and then it updates the project format to v3 format, meaning that it changes the content of the package a bit. But it doesn’t modify the content, text and images.
So maybe you are just not looking at the content in the same way as before?
Anyhow, you can have both v2 and v3 of Scrivener installed on your Mac. I renamed my v2 to Scrivener2 before installing v3 and that way I can always open the old version of the project (Projectname Backup.scriv) in version 2 if something goes wrong in version 3. But so far everything has worked perfectly on both my various Mac:s and the iPad:s.
Thank you so much for your reply. So, I have now been able to open the file in Scrivener 2.8.1, when I wasn’t able to before (I just needed to update v2 to 2.8.1). The blank files in v3 are also blank in 2.8.1, you are right about that. The images are also missing. The strange thing is, I am certain that there was a cover image and text in every single file in the project before the update, and I can see (partially) this missing text in the file preview in both versions. But I need to be able to restore the entire text. Any idea why this is happening? Or how to recover it?? The cover images are less of a priority, since I have those stored elsewhere on my computer.
I’m very careful about backing up the file and closing Scrivener at the end of each session. The data was lost in the update, not during syncing. Could you please tell me what can be done to recover the text?
See if you can locate a backup that contains your missing text. Scrivener->Preferences->Backup in the V2 copy of Scrivener should lead you to the automatic backups it created. If there aren’t any good ones there, see if you can restore older ones from a system backup like Time Machine.
Alternately, CMD-click on the bad copy of the project, and “reveal package contents” or whatever that contextual menu item is. Search for any files with the word “conflict” in them. If they exist, that might be where your missing text is.
Thank you so much for your help! I was able to recover one of the older files in 2.8.1 and then it was fine opening it in v3. What a relief! Is it possible that the problems arose when I opened an older v2 file in v3, before converting it in the most recent v2 software?
Anyway, I am glad to have it resolved. Thanks again for the advice.