Just in case you’re not 100% clear on this, Scrivener has auto-save, so you never have to worry about saving your live project files to disk. You’re focusing on the wrong thing.
What you do need to worry about is ensuring that Scrivener’s zipped backups are running. I’m sure you’ve already turned them back on. See this post I wrote a couple of years ago on this topic for another user. Everything I wrote then is still applicable now. [url]Label Colours Not Working - #5 by JimRac]
These are symptoms that the .scrivx project file was somehow corrupted. When that happens, the data and documents you’ve created still exist, but the project can’t find them anymore. Then, when you start working again in the project, bits and pieces begin reappearing, as if by magic.One possible cause of corruption is that you pulled the USB drive out in the middle of some disk I/O. Or it could just be the USB drive is flakey. We’ll never know for sure.
Why are you storing your project on a USB and not on your hard drive? If you tell us the problem you’re trying to solve by doing so (sharing between PCs?) then possibly we can suggest some better approaches.
Best,
Jim