I was using the free trial of scrivener in late 2015 to work on a novel I was writing however I dropped it and never finished the trial. I kept the file right where it was until earlier this year when my computer was taken over by some weird account due to my roommate playing around with the admin privileges. I was completely locked out of anything requiring admin permissions and the only thing I could do was factory reset the pc. So I backed up all my important files using Facebook in a pm to myself, This included that project as well as a lot of other stuff.
Well today I decided I wanted to look over that old project and consider picking it back up again in time for Nano so I reinstalled Scrivener’s trial version so I could convert the files to a Wordpad and downloaded my project from Facebook. Well first Scrivener would crash every time I tried to open the file then after force closing it I went to move the file from Downloads thinking that was the issue and it had been renamed Downloads.scriv so I deleted it and re-downloaded the original file this time placing it in documents.
It finally opened this time and it had all the categories I made for my chapters and characters and all the names but each section was blank! So lets say I went into Chapter One just to get a blank page. I exited and went to look at the file and it was renamed Documents.scriv! I tried uninstalling and reinstalling and I even put my project into a folder with the exact same name as it but nothing!!! Is there any way to recover my work? I put so much effort into that story that it really cheeses me off that it would get deleted like that!
Check prior backups you might have had. Have you had any online backup service in the past? Any Time Machine backups? Carbon Copy Clones? The best way to save a Scrivener file is to use “Backup To” which packs it as a Zip file (depending on your Preference setup) which contains all your files. Scrivener is actually a bunch of files packaged inside one single .scrv file. Scrivener creates backup files at this location: User - Library - Applicaton Support - Scrivener - Backups: there you will find many zip backups. But probably all this is gone, since you deleted your data, right?
A Scrivener project is actually a folder (name ending in .scriv) that contains multiple subfolders and files. (This is normally hidden on Macintoshes, with the project folder presented as though it is a single object (“package”).) Within the project .scriv folder will be an index file (name ending in .scrivx) and multiple subfolders. One actually opens (launches) the .scrivx index file and Scrivner then presents and manages all that material as though it is a single thing (project).
First question would be did you backup and subsequently restore the project folder and all of its contents?
If not, if the .scrivx index file is present but some other materials aren’t, you might encounter this.
If all the contents were recovered, the project may be corrupted (index referencing incorrect or missing files?). I would have to refer you to other posts and folks here on the forums, or L&L’s tech support email windows.support@literatureandlatte.com for how to go about attempting to repair it to a form directly usable again in Scrivener.
A manual workaround would be to, in Windows File Explorer rather than in Scrivener, make a copy of the .scriv project folder (including all contents), for safety sake, and then down in the copy’s Files\Doc subfolder, review the individual .rtf document files located there, using WordPad or other .rtf capable apps (Word, …) to see if can recover text, piece by piece. The document files are named numerically, with .rtf file type. (Meaningful document names are indexed to these numerically named files in the .scrivx file mentioned earlier, which can be viewed by .xml capable editors such as UltraEdit (free trial available for download). In the project’s Files subfolder, there may also be a search.indexes file, also viewable by .xml capable editors, that contains and ties together the numeric portion of the names with the meaningful names and includes a copy of the texts. )
Hope that is of some assistance.