Messed myself up, can't find much-needed file

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
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I’ve been writing a book manuscript in Scrivener for about 10 months – my Dropbox and my hard drive are both full of different backups of the book, most of them named by default, with dates and times.

On June 1, I turned in the manuscript. At that point, I was using two .Scriv files on a daily basis. One was the book itself, in chapters. The other was all my research, which grew regularly.

And now the problem: Since turning in the manuscript, I’ve been unable to locate the research file. I’ve tried Spotlight searches, using key words and phrases – I’ve opened every file that appears in Spotlight, but none is the last-updated research file. I’ve located a much-earlier version of the research file, but it’s missing months of data. I’ve also tried searching by last-opened date, with no results.

It’s somewhere on my computer or Dropbox, I’m pretty sure. I need to find it soon – I have three weeks left to revise a 600-page manuscript. Thanks for any help…

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How have you been searching? I’d try using Spotlight to search for specific words in the research project documents and see if you can find anything that way, as well as just searching for .scriv. You could also search for files by the modified date, if you know it was around June 1st that you last worked in the project.

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The good news is, I found it. It was in my Documents folder, which is where it automatically backed up. There was no extension on the file name, which might’ve added to my confusion – and I have no idea why it didn’t turn up in a Spotlight search.

For me, the lesson is to always use unique and descriptive names when saving, or to use a numerical system (version 1, version 2, version 3…).