Have you emptied your trash?
hmmm, didn’t see anything - a lot of “permission denied” and “operation not permitted.” Thank you, but I think I’ll have to give up.
But thank you so much for all the suggestions!
Backups exist for my other two projects, so clearly they were on. It is indeed a mystery!
@LM I don’t want to cast aspersions without merit…. Did you find anything at all in your trash folder? A causal bad actor would just empty the trash rather than selectively permanently delete individual files. A more sophisticated attack would be unlikely to stop at so minor a selection of your digital life.
If your system drive is less than 50% utilized, you might want to take a change that Disk Drill can uncover something that could be used to restore or reconstruct the errant project. Since you are on Mac the contents of the package file that projects are stored in are still kept together unlike windows where the project file is just a zip file which is more prone to dataloss after undeleting.
The Disk Drill process is relatively painless and straightforward, but is slow. Like set it up before going to bed slow.
I have never tried to recover a deleted scrivener project (Mac or Windows) so I’m not much help past pointing you to tools that might work. I’m sure others here can offer insights on the viability of drive scanning for deleted projects.
Yes, that’s to be expected, but any “real” results may be tucked away in the midst of all of those, so look very carefully. You can do this to copy the output to a file which you can open and search at leisure:
find . -name '*text*' > ~/Documents/search.txt
That will search for the string ‘text’ as a part of the filename and put all the results scrolling by into a text file named search.txt in your Mac’s Documents folder. You’ll see the same stuff on the screen while it’s running, and it’ll take just as long as it did before, so just be patient.
The other option is to try just searching for text within your project file, some exact string which you may know is in there:
grep -R 'Call me Ishmael.' > ~/Documents/search.txt
That search will take quite a while, and still bring up all those ‘Permission denied’, etc, responses, but the grep command is able to find text within .scriv project files, so it should find it, if it is indeed anywhere on your drive. It’s still too early to give up! Try that grep one (also first doing cd /) and let it run for however long it takes. As long as you type a string that is absolutely certainly within the project file, it will find it. Just a string of three or four words should be enough; it doesn’t have to be a full sentence.
Good luck!