Summary: In a strange new development, the past records in my Writing History are all off by a day. But today’s words were recorded on the correct day, so I really can’t understand how this happened.
Details: After some time away from regular writing while I had a busy month, today I was checking out my Writing History to see how much (little) I wrote in May. Since I knew which dates I did and didn’t add anything to Scrivener, I was able to notice that the Writing History records were all off by a day. For example, I did some writing on May 12 and 15, but the Writing History shows no new draft words those days, and instead new words on May 11 and 14, when I know I didn’t write.
Scrolling back through the history, everything now seems to be off by a day. (There are certain days of the week I tend not to write, so I could confirm by checking against the calendar.) But I’m certain this wasn’t the case when the words were initially recorded, because I look at the Writing History regularly, and everything was as expected before my time off.
Today’s words showed up in the correct day (June 2), and Scrivener knows my current date and time (confirmed by inserting a time stamp.)
This issue appeared sometime in the past two weeks when I wasn’t actively using Scrivener. I did have the application open on my computer most of that time, and typed in a few notes on a couple of days. I traveled with my computer from the Pacific to Eastern time zone during that time, but am now back in Pacific time.
I found the writing.history file, and the dates in there match the now-wrong dates shown in the Writing History. So I could fix this by modifying the file with a script if I want to. But can anyone figure out what’s going on?
Yeah, that doesn’t actually sound right to me. I could see them being displayed differently if you cross the date line, or I suppose often write around midnight (though even then that would be an iffy design choice—this makes more sense with modification dates and custom metadata where you leave the timezone shift option enabled), but since these dates aren’t even recorded with a full ISO stamp, including the time zone, I don’t think they should be modified like that in the record. There is no way of knowing where you were when the date was printed in the file, in other words, so thus no way of assuming they should be now different.
I thought to check my backups to see exactly when the change to the writing.history file happened. It turns out the issue first appeared the same day I noticed it, June 2. The file from June 1 (and before) has the expected dates, and at that point I had already completed my travels, also suggesting this isn’t about changing time zones.
Unfortunately I don’t have hourly incremental backups to nail down the change more granularly. Was there a Scrivener update I might have received at the beginning of June? Is there anything else I can check on that might help you investigate?
Thanks for looking into those things. That’s good to know it’s probably not involved with travel or odd work time combinations. Such things can be a bit of a pain to test for! While we could have speculated that the bug didn’t manifest until you finally closed it (this file is not written during routine auto-saves, only on manual saves and shutdown), the fact that the routine project backups were okay does mean the copy held in memory was okay, too, until recently.
Unfortunately that doesn’t leave me with a whole lot to check against though!
I presume there is nothing unusual that happened around that time, no system updates applied? As for Scrivener, the last update was in December, so nothing has changed with the code since then. You can’t rule out system updates though, as they can have extremely specific impacts on Mac software (like this one, that popped up out of the blue several weeks ago).
At least you do have a very recent copy of that file that is correct. It is perfectly safe to transpose that copy (perhaps with the last line or two copied from the current version) into your project while it is closed. It is entirely self-contained.
Yeah I guess for now just keep tabs on it, and if it shifts again, try and think of anything specific that might have been done in the software that isn’t routine—goals that were met, resetting the daily session manually, or it showed up at a particular time like overnight, and upon waking the computer from sleep.
And I’ll keep an eye out for any other reports. I bet it’s one of those things that, even if it is happening to others, the overlap between it happening and people noticing might be quite low.