While importing text from Open Office the program stopped working. When I re-opened it, this warning came up: " This project appears to have been opened on another machine and could still be so. Editing projects on the same machine at the same time is likely to corrupt project files. Continue?"
What does it mean? I only have the project opened on my laptop. Though I did save it in two places on the same disk, just to be sure I don’t loose it - it had happened once.
This will happen when the program crashes with a project open. When you open a project, it creates a user.lock file inside the Files folder, this file is checked for whenever the project is opened, and if it exists you’ll be warned that the project appears to be open. Naturally, when the project is normally closed, this lock file is removed as one of the final steps. So, if there is a crash, that file is never removed and to Scrivener it appears as though someone else has the file open.
The main purpose of this lock file is for people who are sharing their project on a file server or sharing service like Dropbox. That way, if your colleague is working on the project and you didn’t realise it, you’ll be warned.
It is totally safe to disregard this warning when you yourself were last editing the file, and you know for certain you aren’t still editing on another computer, etc. If unsure, use the copy button, but otherwise it’s fine to just open it.