I have been using Scrivner on a desktop and laptop via Dropbox for a few years now. Today, I went somewhere with my laptop and restructured the entire first third of my novel in the Outline window (not the Binder), occasionally hitting CTRL+S, mostly out of habit. I get home a few hours later, go onto my desktop machine, and LO, that entire first third is now completely missing.
At first I thought maybe I just needed to give the WiFi more time to update, but other files I had also been working on – WORD files – updated without issue. FWIW, I was at Panera, at lunchtime, and it’s possible – likely even – that the 30 minute lunchtime restriction using their WiFi came into effect. But I was still saving manually periodically, so shouldn’t there be SOMETHING on my laptop?
I am trying to stay calm, LOL. I went into the options on my laptop, and for some reason I had Backups turned off. On my desktop, fortunately I have a backup from two days ago, so it’s not a complete loss, yet. But I would really like to know WHERE da eff the work I did today on the laptop went…Doesn’t CTRL+S save any new work, regardless of what window etc one is working in?
If you had backups turned off, wouldn’t that mean that ctrl+S only saved on top of the old version, overwriting it?
I had a similar situation. I opened the project on my second computer, realised that something was wrong and just closed Scrivener again. I then opened the first computer, but turned of WiFi before Dropbox could do anything. Opened the project again, checked that everything was okay, closed Scrivener, waited until Dropbox had synced, and then went back to my second computer, and ‘voila!’, everything was in order.
Right. I want to say that if Panera had ended my WiFi connection (unbeknownst to me), and I was still saving, and I was saving to Dropbox, the save wasn’t really going anywhere. Unless I am just way off in my understanding. Fortunately I found a backup on my desktop from a couple days ago, so not all is lost, just a couple solid days’ work. Lesson learned.
If you lose internet connectivity while using Dropbox, then it takes note of when it was last able to sync. When you go somewhere with a good connection, or re-establish the lost connection, it will resume uploading the changes that are saved to your computer’s hard drive. But you have to give it a chance to do that before you go to another computer and try to open the same project from the dropbox folder. You also have to then give the other computer a chance to download those changes to its computer before opening the project in Scrivener. Rather than be in the CTRL-s habit, I suggest you get into the “when I get home to the other computer, I’ll open the laptop and make sure dropbox is done syncing on both computers” habit.
Also, CTRL-s doesn’t do anything by default; Scrivener saves whenever you pause for a couple of seconds. You can turn on features that make CTRL-s do something, like create a fresh backup of the entire project (but that produces quite a lot of useless backups if you ever want to go back a day or a week).
Well, that explains it then. I had no WiFi connection, so the autosave was going nowhere (so to speak), and CTRL+S wasn’t even functional. Then, I made matters far worse by not letting things sync once I accessed the other machine.
I guess I will choose to look at it with a positive frame of mind: as I redo this, it will be better this time
An even more positive frame of mind: at least you HAD a semi-recent backup that allowed you to recover SOME of your work. When you realize you have nothing whatsoever of a project remaining except what’s rolling around in your head, it’s a different kind of panic, especially if it was something important, and not a piece of whimsy.
