Panic time (and relief, thanks Google Drive)

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
1

Hi…
so, a bit of a sweat here.
Working on a very, very long project.
Something happened during a session with Scrivener today, after a long day of work. Windows 10 Blue screen, restart.
Then I could not open Scrivener anymore.
A bit upset, I reinstalled the software. Surprise: same results.
I switched to my laptop. But Scrivener would not open on this one either.
Then I got it. It was the Scrivener file, the main document. They were the same on each computer, since they were on a cloud service (Google Drive).
Opened the tutorial in Scrivener, and it opened. OK,. so it is not the program iitself.

Went to my web Google Drive. Was not sure if there were any versions recorded. My last back up was 6 hours ago. A lot of writing and structuring since.
Well, there were versions. 100 of them!
Was able to DOWNLOAD the 100th main document version, put it in place of the corrupted document.
Opened.
Wow. I lost maybe 10 minutes of work. (there was a rtf doc, created at the time of the last Scrivener save. Tried to open it in MS Word, just random characters in it. Too bad.)
Thanks Google Drive!

2

Glad to hear that you are back up and running!

FYI, despite the success you had in recovering your work, L&L strongly recommend against keeping live Scrivener project files on Google Drive.

As per this recent post from Katherine, “It appears to have trouble keeping up with Scrivener’s frequent saves, which can lead to data loss and project corruption”. [url]https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/converting-old-scrivener-file-type/37201/2]

L&L take the risk seriously enough to put a warning on their KnowledgeBase: https://scrivener.tenderapp.com/help/kb/cloud-syncing/google-drive-advisory

There are no “Cloud police”, so you can do what you like. :slight_smile:

Just understand that there is a significant risk involved.

Jim (no affiliation with L&L)

3

Hi. Thks for the reply.
GoogleDrive seems to have improved a lot in recent months. I am slowly (but surely) switching from Dropbox to GDrive in the other areas of my work. As for my work on Scrivener, I switched this March, without a hiccup since then. I’ve been working on it most of the days since then. It is now a 354 Mb project.
But this is just an empirical observation. I did not test the platform in many situations.
I guess we should continue to gather and share observations and experiences.
( I do have, however, a back up software keeping multiple copies locally. Just in case.)

4

Hi rougetaureau,

Thanks for the update on Drive, it does sound like it’s working well for your setup.

Best of luck,
Jim

5

Exactly what I would recommend.

One easy way to do this is to configure Scrivener’s own automatic backups to go to the local drive. They’ll protect you from any Google Drive issues, and Google Drive will protect you from local issues.

Katherine