I put the projects on a thumb drive and they appeared to move to the new computer…but even after downloading Scrivener to the new laptop and registering it to my code, it appears all that transferred is shortcut icons.
Worse when I went back to my original computer, they had been moved to the USB and from there opened folders to show files, rather than opening as a project. When I opened Scrivener itself on the original computer and hit ‘open existing project’ they opened correctly as a S. project.
Some of them now open up as a file with various documents, etc in which the last folder within that file seems to be the complete project. But when I click on them on the new computer, I now get a note that it’s already open and do I want to continue or create a copy. This happens when there’s no Scrivener icon on the bottom to indicate they’re already open.
So the good news is I CAN get at my projects. But it’s taking an extra step or three that it shouldn’t.
Is it possible that this happened because I transfered some of them over before downloading Scrivener to the new computer? Would that cause something like this?
If Scriv says that the project is open it is probably because it wasn’t properly closed on the other machine, before being transferred to the thumb drive, or before the thimb drive was disconnected.
The safest way of moving projects between computers is to Back up to… to the thumb drive, as a zip file, and then copy the zip from the thumb to the new PC, unpack the zip file and then finally open the project.
Note that the .scriv folder (you need to enable viewing file name extensions if you don’t see those) is your project. The .scrivx file within it is just an index of the contents of your project. It sounds like you just copied the index file, not the whole project folder.
If you find it easier, you can open each project on your original PC using Scrivener and use File->Save As to create a new copy on your thumb drive. When you go to transfer your projects from the thumb drive, be sure to copy the folder for each project, not just the .scrivx file within each folder.
It turns out I could only open them on the new machine because the thumb drive was still in. So I’ll give your suggestions a try. The projects were closed on the other laptop when I moved them onto the thumb drive.