I was working away on Scrivener when a power failure struck the suburb. Once I had power and the PC back on, I checked Scrivener and noticed that about 2 hours of work, consisting of a number of pages, wasn’t showing up in the binder. I checked in the project Files folder and what I entered appears to be all there, contained in a number of RTFs.
Is it possible to rebuild the binder structure to included these other files? I thought Scrivener automatically rebuilt or reindexed in the background, but none of the new work is showing up using the search function. (I can’t even recall what I named all the different pages, which were in different locations.)
What should I do in this case?
The indexing function will get a little more robust in future so this will be made a bit easier, but for now you can essentially fix this yourself in about the same way it would do automatically. What’s happened is that your .scrivx file got upset in the crash, so it’s lost all record of those new documents you entered, even though the documents themselves are safe. Unfortunately, since the .scrvix file contains not only the binder structure but also the document title and meta-data (label, status, etc.) all of that has been wiped, so you’ll need to redo it. Even with an automatic reindexing, the best Scrivener can do is to find the files in your project that aren’t identified in the binder and pull them into a new “Recovered Files” folder for you; it can’t put them back where they originally were or give them their titles and so forth.
Happily, the document text itself is safe, and you can bring it back into the binder by leaning on the “New Text” button until they stop reappearing. Basically what happens is that when you create a new item in the binder, the .scrivx file assigns it a number, incrementing from the last created item, and then when you start typing in the document an RTF with the same number is created in the project. In this case, when the .scrivx creates the new item in the list, the corresponding RTF will already exist, so the text of that document will suddenly appear in the editor (doc notes and the synopsis will likewise appear) and everything will be linked up again; you can retitle the document and move it to wherever it belongs in the binder and you’re good to go. So just keep creating new documents in the binder until your missing texts are all restored and the new documents really are completely blank, then reassign the meta-data as necessary and place them back in their proper binder order. And then use File>Backup Project To to make a backup of your work!
Thanks MM!
After doing 4 new blank text pages, which generated various lower number RTFs, the material from the most recent RTFs started appearing and I now have everything back.
You mentioned automatic reindexing, is that available now with a special key sequence or is it a future feature?
It’ll be coming, as well as a way to manually force a re-index. I’m not entirely sure on the timeline for that, sorry.