For some reason I can’t open my Scrivener – it’s coming up with the message that I can’t open it because it may be damaged or incomplete. This is a nightmare as I have two novels on there that are in the final stages of editing.
Is there anything I can do to access these? Any suggestions as to what the problem might be? It was working fine on Saturday.
Since that time I’ve downloaded WinebottlerCombo_1.8-rc4.dmg to enable me to open a zip file that I downloaded called Samurai (a tool to help keyword targeting on Amazon for authors). I’m wondering if these might have caused a problem and if so, should I send them to Trash?
Any help you can give me would be gratefully received as I’m not very technically minded.
Thank you
Carolyn.
Yes, you sould have to download it from where you bought it.
No, the project files are not affected by deleting the app. If you changed the default folders for your projects and backups, you would have to change that again in the “new” app, but having done that everything should be as before.
Apps do screw up sometimes, even sofisticated ones like Scrivener. On a Mac one simply re-install them.
On your Mac, your projects are entirely separate from the Scrivener program itself. The Scrivener program will be in your “Applications” folder; the project files are in your user account, probably somewhere in the “Documents” folder, wherever has been set in the preferences, the default location if you haven’t changed it. open a finder window, type .scriv (like that including the . ) and you should see a little dropdown. Choose “Scrivener Project” and the window will list all your Scrivener projects. Further tip: on the “View” menu in finder, choose “Show Path Bar” and when you select a project, the “breadcrumb” trail to where it is stored on your hard disk will be shown at the bottom of the window.
So no, deleting or replacing the Scrivener program in “Applications” will not remove the project(s) containing your novels.
Yes, you should download it again from the Lit&Lat website. You should be updating to version 2.8 anyway, as I believe that, apart from changes necessary to sync with the iOS version, it has a number of bug-squashes or work arounds for Apple bugs.
I’ve been using Dropbox and Cubby for years for active Scrivener projects, including for co-operating with collaborators, and have only encountered conflict problems two or three times, and those were all due to not allowing Dropbox (or Cubby) to sync fully before either shutting down or opening a project on a different machine. So, my guess is that you didn’t given Dropbox time to upload all the files completely—and if you’ve got 5 novels’ worth of text in there that would take a bit of time—or this other app you’ve installed has done something malicious. But my bet is you didn’t allow Dropbox to upload all the files completely before trying to open the project.
But I’m not the one to tell you how to recover from that; others should be able to advise, Lit&Lat support definitely will.
Thank you both very much. I’ve just got in and your replies are really helpful. I don’t feel quite so panicked about it now. I also emailed Scrivener direct and will probably just wait to see if they have anything to add, before I go ahead and delete the current version and re-download it again from scratch. Keeping my fingers crossed …
