I know this is very familiar to you by now, but I have lost my ENTIRE mss in Scrivener beta for Windows and to me it’s painful, personal and pretty unbelievable. I spent so long setting up chapters and then putting synopsis of each chapter on the bulletin board. Each time a beta expired (2), my work was still there when I went back again…until today.
All the chapter headings are still set up, but there is absolutely nothing under each heading, or in each section. Obviously I have it saved in a complete document elsewhere, but not the individual chapter synopsis and the changes I made within Scrivener.
Please tell me all my work is hiding somewhere just waiting for me to recover it…please.
Do you perhaps have more than one version of the project on your disk, and for some reason you’ve ended up loading an older revision? If you go into the Files/Docs folder, do you see a bunch of ##_synopsis.txt files?
Thank you thank you thank you…sorry it’s taken me so long to get back. I was so demoralized I couldn’t face it again, so I began editing what I could elsewhere in saved documents.
Instead of looking in the doc files as you suggested, I first decided to open up the version of Scrivener on my desktop again to see if anything had changed and was faced with the blank chapters, as before. For some reason, I went to File, Recent Projects and there it all was!! I still have the blank chapter window open. I have not had to uninstall and reinstall before. I normally just open it up and click on the box that says it’s going to expire to reactivate it. Should I delete blank version or are they linked and I’ll lose it all?
It’s quite okay to remove the old blank version of your project. In fact that’s probably a good idea so it doesn’t get in the way in the future. What probably happened is that at some point in the past you used File/Save As which creates a duplicate copy of the project and transfers you over to it. You might have continued working in the new duplicate for some time, and then for some reason you ended up loading the wrong (old) project from when you used save as, so basically you’re looking at an historic version of the project. That would be my guess.
But there are no “links” or anything binding these two project folders together. Projects are discrete entities, they share no resources amongst each other. Just make sure you delete the right one. Pay close attention to the name in the title bar of the window, and make sure it is the blank one that you remove using Windows Explorer. Also, make sure you close the blank project first, if you leave it open while deleting it, parts of the project might write to the disk and create an even more confusing result when you do eventually close it.
A tip: Familiarise yourself with the File/Backup Project To... command. Even if you never end up restoring from a backup, having bunches of those around can mean the difference between “Nooooooo!” and “Oh, darn.”.
