An interesting observation.
I am currently using Scrivener for poetry and short stories.
Because I use both a PC and laptop, I copy&paste between the two machines using a USB stick, copying each time the full .scriv folder.
My poetry is set out in two folders within the project. One titled “Completed”, the other “Wips”.
When a Wip is completed I drag it from Wip into Completed.
Recently I noticed I appear to be missing both wips and completed poems, checking carefully each individual text. I initially thought it was old age and memory playing tricks, but it started to become more frequent (missing text, not memory misplacement …… ).
A couple of tests with compile of both folders failed to find missing bits and pieces.
Hitting the “Add Text” button, I discovered a section of missing Wip appear in Completed. Continual hitting of the same button brought half a dozen missing texts back into view. I continued to hit the button until the icon appeared blank. In all 11 bits of missing text surfaced, both wips and poems.
I no longer copy&paste to synchronise my work. Instead I keep the main working files on the stick, backing up after each session on PC and laptop.
This sounds like a problem usually caused by working from Dropbox or another sync service. Are you doing anything like that? What happens is that the .scrivx file (which indexes items in the binder, among other things) gets out of sync with other aspects of the .scriv project, so although the documents are present in the project folder, they’re not listed in the .scrivx file and so don’t appear in your binder. Documents are all identified in Scrivener under the hood by a number, which just increments with each document created or imported, so when you go to create a new file, the .scrivx creates a place for the next number up–but, since it’s lagging behind, the number it creates is already in use, and so that document pops into place: thus, your missing writing suddenly reappears.
As I said, I’ve seen this happen most often when someone’s using Dropbox or a similar service and has a bad sync, so that not all the files are fully updated before the project is opened and edited. If you look inside the .scriv folder in Explorer, you’ll usually see some files named with “conflicted version” or “[computer-name]-version” or the like.
So the first question here is, have you been using any kind of sync service with the project? Do you have any oddly-named files in the .scriv folder, as described above?
If not, have you had any computer crashes or other odd behavior when working in the project?
I think you may have solved my issue - I was using allsync, and what you say makes perfect sense.
I shall stay away from sync methods.
Will there be any built-in sync to any later version of Scrivener for Windows ? - I used to use MS OneNote for my poetry writing, purely because it allowed me to use two machines.