I just had a very serious problem in the current beta version of the program. I have no earthly idea how to reproduce it.
I was making an edit to a scene (an individual file in a folder) and then I realized that I was making the change in the wrong scene. So I used the mouse in the binder to select the correct scene (still in the same folder). I made the needed changes, and then went back to the first scene to remove the unnecessary changes. I used the “UNDO” (CTRL-Z) command for that.
Then I went to go back to the correct scene (the second scene, above) and IT WAS GONE!!! Completely vanished, missing from the manuscript.
I looked in the Trash, I looked in my Orphaned Scenes folder, I’ve looked everywhere for it. I checked the word count in the Project Stats thingy and it AGREED that the scene was missing-- it was off by about the write number of words. There were around 53,000 words before, and now around 51,000-- which is about the correct number of words for that scene.
I don’t think I did anything unusual. I can’t recall any fumble-fingers or errant keystrokes. I only used the mouse to click on the scenes in the binder and locate te cursor to the correct position to make the edits. It’s just GONE.
I’m not overly horrified as I have a backup of the scene I can easily retrieve it from but I thought you all should know right away. Something happened, and I don’t think it was me. I’ll be happy to cop to it if it was somehow, but I don’t think I did anything to make it happen.
UPDATE - I found the missing scene. I made a backup of the file, just in case, then I reloaded it and it showed up at the bottom of the list, OUTSIDE of the Manuscript but not in the trash or in my orphaned files folder. I did not explicitly move it there.
When I put it back, the word count is restored.
SOMETHING HAPPENED I’m not sure what, and I’m reasonably sure it wasn’t me. It was just weird. But fortunately, the scene wasn’t actually lost entirely. Just moved to a strange place in the binder.
Sometimes, as I mouse over an entry in the binder, it’ll flash a menu at me, and when I click on something else, I have clicked on a menu entry. Especially if I do it at speed. I ran into this with a number of dialog boxes, and I commented on the issue (it’s been a while, though).
And sometimes I click on a binder entry and not realize I’m dragging it, and I drop it under another binder entry (every binder entry can act as both document and as a folder containing other binder entries) without even realizing I’m doing it.
Scrivener’s UNDO function does not work on document moves.So I’m betting this is approximately what happened.
As noted, the most likely issue was an errant document move.
For future reference, the Project Search is the best way to locate missing documents. It will search the entire project, including the Trash, the limbo outside the Draft folder, and so on.