I updated to Scrivener 3, and when I went to open my projects, they weren’t there! I searched my harddrive for anything with the .scriv extension and there’s only two, when there should be over a dozen! I have a folder of backups but I’m not sure they’re the latest ones. What happened??
Update - I checked the backups in my regular backup folder, and the last one is from 2014! There should be one from 2017! Now I’m really starting to flip out. I also searched under .scrivx and none of my projects from the last several years are showing up anywhere!!
On a Mac the projects end with .scriv not .scrivx
Yeah, I tried both. No luck.
Where did you save your projects. There is no connection between the app and the project folders so updating the app should not have affected your projects in any way. Don’t you have backup using e.g. TimeMachine?
I use dropbox, and the Scrivener project files are in various folders depending on what they are. All the Scrivener projects from the last two years are gone, but nothing else is gone. I’ve been through the entire history of the last 6 months on dropbox and none of them were moved or deleted, according to that history. I just can’t see them now!
This may seem like a silly question, but how are you trying to see them? Are you looking in your actual dropbox folder that is resident on your computer?
I’m going to direct you to do where angels fear to tread… the command line. Fear not! For nothing destructive shall come of it. This will definitively tell you if your projects are still present in your user folder.
Open the Terminal App (in the Applications\Utilities folder, I believe). Make sure the window is as wide as your screen, so that the output will (hopefully) be easier to read.
Copy and paste the following there:
find $HOME -type d -name "*scriv" -printHit enter, and let it churn for a while; it could take several minutes before it returns anything. If it does, then the paths to your projects should be clear. Note that if you’re finding them in strange, unfamiliar folders, come back and ask the group for advice before delving in to edit them.
I’ve looked for them on the dropbox website itself - no sign of them in “events” history or deleted files, and they’re not where they usually lived before this happened.
Eep! The command line! Okay, will try! Thank you!
Well, crap. The command-line trick did show a lot of files I wasn’t otherwise seeing, but no Scrivener files from later than 2015. That means all the files I was actively using in the past two years seem to have been deleted along with Scrivener 2. 
I don’t understand how that’s possible, since there were the active files and backups in two different locations and the active files were on dropbox.
Are you running any cleanup utilities? Did anything ask you if you wanted to remove “related files” when you removed Scrivener 2? There is nothing in Scrivener itself that would cause this kind of wholesale destruction.
Have you looked in the system Trash?
Katherine
Try another nondestructive, Terminal search. This assumes that you used Scrivener’s ZIP backup feature, and that you stored them in your user directory (home folder).
find $HOME -name "*.zip" -printAlso, the freeware App EasyFind made available by DEVON Technologies might be of help. You can use it for a wide scope search such as in your root directory (usually named Macintosh HD) using various terms.
devontechnologies.com/products/freeware.html
Everytime I upgrade scrivener the new version cannot find my files.
WHY?
Where are my files that I’ve been working on for the past 6 years?
I did export my old sciv file as rich text documents before the upgrade to v3.
BUT WHY ISN’T SCRIV V3 ALLOWING ME TO OPEN MY OLD FILES?
Please be more precise about exactly what is happening.
Some people are saying that they “can’t open their files” because the Recent Projects menu is messed up. That is a completely different situation from Scrivener failing to open a project from Finder, or the files being missing altogether. We can’t help you if you can’t tell us what you’re seeing.
(And incidentally, the Recent Projects menu is generated by Mac OS, and can be disrupted in a wide variety of ways. Failure to open a project from there is not a reliable indicator of much of anything.)
Katherine
That suggests that your Scriv files were not being synced by Dropbox in the first place.* Assuming your dropbox was otherwise doing its job, that means your Scriv files were not being kept in your resident dropbox folder on your harddrive.
So, where on your Mac did your Scriv files usually live, I wonder? Though unlikely you would store things there, there are places on your mac which are vulnerable during system upgrades. Also, years ago it occasionally happened that people accidentally created their projects literally inside the Scriv application (as weird as that sounds). Needless to say when they moved to a new version, their projects got tossed along with the old app. But it has been sometime since Scriv was updated to try to prevent this mishap.
Sorry if I am not being more help here. It is just that Scrivener itself would never be in the business of erasing whole projects from your harddrive ever. So, I guess we are here trying to remotely figure out what is going on with you and your computer set up that has put you in this pickle.
gr
- I think you might have said there were some years old versions there, that suggests that at some point you started working on copies of your Sciv project that lived somewhere else. If you are in the habit of using the Recents menu, it is possible to do this for some time without realizing it, since if you ever open some other copy of your project (like a backup or archived copy), your recents menu will present that copy as the most recent – which invites you to start opening that one and editing it without realizing. I wonder if this could have happened to you? Are you a Recents menu person?
This also might prove illuminating… when you create a new project, where do you put it? You have to designate a folder to save the project in.
And here’s a very odd question: Is it possible that you were saving all your projects in the installation bundle that you downloaded from the website last time, and now that the new one has replaced it, that old virtual disk contains all your projects? If you scroll through your finder, is there an entry for “Scrivener” there? Is that where you would choose to create a new project?
I’m not running any cleanup utilities, and was not asked about deleting related files. I checked the trash, but I’m not sure if “system trash” is different - I mean I checked the trash on the desktop, outside of Scrivener. Nothing there.
BUT!! This terminal command showed this very promising file:
/Users/katherine/Library/Application Support/Scrivener/Backups/Mysticism.bak2017-10-27T15-17.zip
How do I get to that safely??
I am indeed a recents person (or was! Never again!) so I think you’re right about this, and it explains the Dropbox end of this mystery.
I’m horrified at the idea that I could somehow have had my active files in the installation folder, but that’s starting to sound like the only explanation here. Ouch. But as you can see from my other post, I’m now hopeful I’ve spotted a backup file - I just don’t know how to get to it yet.
So I used EasyFind (thank you for that rec!!) to open the folder containing this promising backup file in Finder, and I’ve not copied that zip file to a dropbox folder. Can I just unzip it there and then open it in Scrivener 3? Am now terrified to touch anything…