Newer files deleted, replaced by older files?

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

At the end of November 2012 I closed a project I’d been working on, and today I tried to reopen it. Problem is, every file I open has only a small portion of my work in it.

For example, I can find a .scriv file that was last modified on November 6th, another on November 7th. Both of these have about twenty percent of the work that was actually done. One of them has notecards along the side, but most of them are blank. There are no .scriv files with this file name dated after November 11th, though the last save should have been late November. There are several .scriv files because I use Dropbox, and when I’ve forgotten to close Scrivener on my home computer, I’ll create a copy on my laptop, because I’ve lost words when I just opened the file.

I have scoured Dropbox for deleted files. I have gone through my laptop and my home computer searching for files with .scriv extensions, searching by date modified, date created, searching by name. Nothing.

I have searched through the Scrivener automatic backups. Nothing. I have converted the most recent .scriv file to a .scrivx so I can look at the individual files. Nothing turns up any more than the beginning of the project, and I’m at my wit’s end. Can anyone help me recover my manuscript? It’s so bizarre to me that I could just lose three weeks of work, without a trace.

2

Did you perhaps write the final pieces on a different machine that wasn’t hooked up to Dropbox (or perhaps had malfunctioned in its connection to it?) If there is no record of the data on their servers, then for some reason there was a period of time toward the end of November where uploads were not making it to the server. Do you have record of uploads from other files you were working on around that time?

At any rate, I cannot think of any other places that you should check. It sounds like you have gone over every place that Scrivener and Dropbox save redundant data for backup purposes. Time Machine is the only other thing I can think of, but it would be odd for that to have a newer copy of something than your main disk, unless you had rolled things back intentionally some time ago.