After a power outage, i turned on scrivener to find that all the work on my current chapter had been lost. the whole text. Other changes I made to the project during the same session (though in other chapters) have however remained. My project is just as it was before the outtage except that the whole text of my latest chapter (and the one I was working on right that second when the power went) is gone. if it helps, even the formatting of the chapter reverted to default (courier new), instead of calibri. Another data point is that this chapter had text on it before this session, so its not as if the progress on that chapter was not saved (I assume) as those first few paragraphs should still be there… its that the whole chapter was transformed into a blank page with default settings.
I thought scrivener was built to prevent this? I’d appreciate any help you can offer in finding what happened and if I can recover the text.
Check that you have the automatic saves turned on. Scrivener will save current changes when there are two seconds of inactivity. Not every two seconds as some think. you can set the time. 2 seconds is good. but if you do. it stop typing for 2 seconds no auto save is made.
As to how to recover, I do not have good ideas. Others may.
Loss of power is a risk for computers. Laptops with their batteries will ride thru power outages. I have my iMac running through a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) to protect the computer against power outages.
That’s the thing; I have autosaving on every 2 seconds, and there were multiple points in the session where I tabbed off to search for music or other some such. something should’ve survived. what’s more, why did it delete the previous two paragraphs? those had been saved last night in the same chapter and when I opened it this morning they were still there. After the outtage though–gone.
Respectfully, I don’t think the issue is around this. There were plenty of 2, 5, 20 and heck, 120 second pauses where I stopped to think what to write next and didn’t even move the mouse. And even if I wrote like a machine all throughout the session (which I didn’t) the chapter should’ve still come through the outtage with the original two paragraphs already written on it before session start.
You should be able to retrieve the preexisting part of the document from one of Scrivener’s automatic backups. Go to the Scrivener → Preferences → Backups tab to find them.
There is a scenario where an OS-level crash can (sometimes) corrupt the document open in Scrivener’s editor. When this happens, the open document becomes unusable. I don’t know why an OS-level crash sometimes causes this and why it sometimes doesn’t, I’m just relating what I’ve read from the experiences of posters to this forum.
So what happened to you wasn’t that autosave didn’t work, it was that the open document was corrupted.
As @kewms says upthread, recovery of writing you did prior to the crash session would be from Scrivener’s zipped backups.
I work on a laptop with a battery, so a power outage scenario is an unlikely one for me, nor is my laptop prone to crashes. Still, I try to mitigate the risk of an OS-level crash by backing up the project to zip files early and often during my writing sessions. That is, I don’t wait until the end of my writing session to make a backup.
I recommend you do the same, unless your projects are so huge that backup time takes minutes.
See this post for more detailed advice and suggestions I gave to another poster who faced a very similar challenge as you.
Hey, thanks for the response. Yeah I already recovered the two first paragraphs from last night’s backup (for whatever that’s worth…). Bummer about the rest of it… yeah, I suspected they were gone. I’ve set scriv to backup to zip file every time I manually save, but that would still be a maximum of five zip backups per project before they begin overriding, which seems a bit too little for me, especially now that I’ve been burned by lack of backups. Do you know if you can increase the number of backups?
