I’m 15,000 words in. I’ve been using Scrivener for a month, trial was up, I purchased it. Once I entered the license, I couldn’t dismiss the license screen, so I resarted the app using the menus, and my book was there and I continued on.
After an hour, I left the computer, came back a few hours later, and Scrivener had closed like it always does. I fired it back up and it said my document was already open. But it wasn’t. I was given the choice to copy or continue, so I hit copy to be safe.
Now I have two copies of my book, neither of which has a single word I’ve typed or even an note.
I’ve stopped doing anything in hopes that there is someway to retrieve all my work.
I managed to find it - in a completely different scrivener file on an unrelated topic that I started before I started this project. I’ve copied everything to Google Docs to be safe, but now I don’t know if I can ever trust Scrivener. The very LAST thing that can ever happen is for work to disappear, under any circumstances.
This is extremely unusual behaviour. Scrivener doesn’t ‘lose work’ as it saves every few seconds by default. Also Scrivener should not be closing by itself, ever. These things together suggest something else (external) causing an issue. Can you describe precisely what you were doing, and the version of your Scrivener & macOS?
Scrivener does have an automatic quit option. If it simply closed with no error message, that’s probably what happened in this case.
Having a document move to a different project is not something that Scrivener is able to do on its own. OP, either you inadvertently opened a different project or some other piece of software was moving things around behind the scenes.
I’m glad you ultimately found your work. This would be an excellent time to check Scrivener’s automatic backup settings, which you can find in the Scrivener → Settings → Backups tab.
I also encourage all Mac users to set up a Time Machine system backup.
Scrivener has an automatic Quit feature. Mine is set to after 30 minutes of inactivity.
I’m baffled about the chapters being in another book.
I created a test book to learn Scrivener, then created new one for the book I’m working on. The book I’ve been working on is blank, and the original which had no real content now has my chapters in it.
I do have a time machine backup, but I don’t know the file structure enough yet to figure out what to save. I would have gotten that far eventually.
I also found a bunch of .rtfs in a backup folder, which is a great thing.
I’m going to have to learn more about how this thing works before I can trust it again. I’m used to using non-destructive editors, but this doesn’t seem to be that, and the lack of automatic cloud saving is serious drawback. I thought I could overcome it, but now I’m not so sure.
I appreciate the help. I was able to get some more data from the backup files, and it seems you’re right - I’ve been using the Scriv file this whole time. I didn’t know that because my work was always right there when I openned Scrivener, and I never had to choose anything. When it crashed and openned what I thought was the right project, it was blank. So that confusion is sorted.
Something happened that made Scrivener think the file was open when it wasn’t. No idea what, it happened after the first session I did after I enterred my license, so maybe that had something to do with it.
That can happen if Scrivener crashes or otherwise closes abnormally. The “lock” file that indicates whether the project is open can fail to clear correctly. If you’re sure that there are no other copies open, the message is safe to ignore.
If you haven’t already, I’d recommend taking a look at our Interactive Tutorial, available from the Help menu. It’s a good overview of Scrivener’s fundamental operations.
You might also want to read Chapter 5 in the manual, which has a good explanation of what a Scrivener project is, how to create and recover backups, that sort of thing.