Opening/Recovering a Scrivener 3 file in Scrivener 2

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

Hi,

Firstly I wanted to say thank you for both Scrivener and Scapple - both of which are great.

My embarrassing dilemma is this.

I wrote a 55k word novel in Scrivener 3 after upgrading from Scrivener 2 when the new version came out. Unfortunately my macbook pro suffered a fatal disk crash and I have had to replace the hard drive. Unfortunately I have been advised not to upgrade back to Mac OS High Sierra so I am now running on 10.11.6, El Capitan. When I started rebuilding my data from the cloud I recovered my Scrivener files. I was also able to recover my licences for both v2 and v3 of Scrivener. However, I can’t install v3 as my Mac OS is not sufficient. So I reinstalled v2 but can’t open the file as it was created in v3 !!
I can’t afford a new laptop so will be stuck using El Capitan and I accept that I now have a licence for v3 that regrettably I can’t use, but I really wish there was a way of converting my v3 file into v2.

Apologies for this rather sad and embarrassing request, but if anyone does have any suggestions of what I might try (other than saving up and buying a new macbook - which I will do but won’t get there for some time), I would be very grateful.
Thanks
Darren

2

Send an email to the support que, ask them if they will help you. Anyone with v3 can read your project and then export it in v2 format.

3

Thank you Lunk, I have done that now.

4

I wouldn’t advise upgrading to 10.13 either quite yet. I like to wait around a year before adopting Apple’s operating systems—around when they abandon work on them. I figure there is nothing more stable than that. :slight_smile: I’m a little conservative though, when I can be.

Speaking of which, can you upgrade your machine to 10.12? Scrivener 3 runs just fine on that; like I say that is what I use myself.

Otherwise yes, we can help you get the file converted back. If you have a confidant with v3 that would also work. There is a bit of a backlog though from the holidays. Bear with us!

5

I’m still on 10.12.6 and running v3, as well.
If you can and decide to move to 10.12, you can download from Apple here:
support.apple.com/en-us/HT208202

There’s also model requirements there.