I don’t know if this is a limitation to the beta, but I finished one project and went to open a second one (I’m using Scrivener for Mac at home, and save my files in DropBox so I can write at work (shh, don’t tell my boss)). I can see the file, click open, but nothing happens. The dialog box closes and it acts as if I never did anything. I just see the first project (the one I don’t want to work on anymore).
I’ve tried reinstalling, and opening files from my desktop instead of DropBox, but to no avail.
Any suggestions?
You should definitely be able to open a second project. There are no limitations like that imposed on the beta. I often have 2 or 3 projects open at once. Since you are using dropbox there’s a chance your project may have become corrupted.
Do you zip your project files to dropbox, or work on them unzipped. Working on them unzipped increases the chances of corruption. Oh and do have any of your files from dropbox have conflict added to the file name?
This sounds more like the project itself won’t open than that a second project in general won’t open. I’ve seen this happen in earlier versions with some Mac projects, so your reference there makes me suspicious. You could test by closing the first project (under Edit>Options, first set the general preferences so that the start-up window displays if no projects are open, that way closing your first project won’t also close Scrivener) and then trying to open your other project, or by just double-clicking the other project’s .scrivx file from Explorer. If you get any error messages–e.g. “not compatible with this version”–let me know; if that’s the case, you probably just need to fix a file in the project so it will open. If you’re not getting anything at all, and you give it a good wait (I’ve had some larger Mac-based projects take a good minute or two to load), would you be willing to send the project to support AT literatureandlatte DOT com so we can try and figure out what in there is preventing Scrivener from opening it? Just zip up the whole .scriv folder and send it as an attachment.
EDIT: And as Stacey suggested, take a peek in your .scriv folder for any files with “conflicted version” or the like in the name–that would mean there’d been a sync error, and we’d just need to work out getting the proper versions of your file the right names so Scrivener can recognize them.
OK, so I did a little troubleshooting.
Copied the file from a thumb drive and it still wouldn’t open.
Opened a different project from DropBox and it worked.
So it’s the file.
I looked on DropBox and on the thumb drive and there is a “conflicted” folder in there, so I’m guessing that’s causing the problem.
How do I deal with that?
Depends on the file and the time stamp for the conflicted and non-conflicted versions. You’ll want to save the newer of the two, but if there’s a chance that they each contain different edits–e.g. you updated on one computer, the other computer didn’t sync with those changes and then you updated that version, not realizing, you’ll have two different sets of edits–you’ll want to do a bit of additional work.
If you can let me know which files have the conflicted version, I can help walk you through the process, or if you want to zip the whole .scriv project folder and send it to support AT literatureandlatte DOT com (assuming it’s not over 20MB when zipped), I can clean it up for you so it opens and see what editing conflicts there might be.
I deleted the conflicted file and it worked!
Can I see the conflicted files on my Mac, or only on the Windows version?
They’d be visible in either; on the Mac you’d just need to right-click the Scrivener project file in Finder and choose “Show Package Contents”.
Got it!
Thanks so much for your help!!