My PC crashed on reboot and I had to unplug it to restart it. I had closed all my apps first including Scrivener. Upon reboot, I deleted the user.lock file and tried opening my project. A dialogue box opens that says “Project Already Open” and when I hit continue, nothing happens, except that a new user.lock file is generated in the project folder. Any ideas on how to break out of this loop so that I can open my project?
I’d try manually renaming the project’s .scrivx file. (In windows explorer.)
Nothing big. Just add “x” at the end of the name.
You’ll most likely be able to remove it later on.
Also do Ctrl alt delete and open processes box to make sure another instance is not open
Thanks for the suggestion Vincent but it didn’t work. There has to be some way to circumvent scrivener from automatically inserting a new user.lock file when attempting to open the project.
good suggestion goaliedad, but there were no other instances running
Make sure that Scrivener is able to successfully open without any projects at all.
Then make sure it can open the Tutorial project from the Help menu.
Then if you still can’t open your own project (or if either of the above fails), open a support ticket, here:
Thx kewms. I opened a ticket and they didn’t have a very good solution. I ended up figuring it out myself. I store my projects on google drive and it occurred to me that they might have a function to restore a file to an older version. They do indeed, and I restored my .scrivx file to the version before my computer crashed and it worked like a charm.
- Right-click the file and select Manage versions.
- Next to the version you want to download, click the More actions icon.
- Click Download to save a copy to your computer.
- Click CLOSE to close the versions dialog.
- Right-click the same file and select Manage versions again.
- Click UPLOAD NEW VERSION to upload the version you just downloaded.
I hope it is the zipped backups you store on Google Drive. It has a history of seriously messing up active Scrivener projects.
Mark
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yes Mark, I’m just looking into that now. What do you recommend for a cloud service for storing scrivener projects?
The most general recommendation is Dropbox, but as you’re on Windows, OneDrive should be OK, but with either of them you must make sure your .scriv folders are set to be always available locally, not just stored in the cloud, as a Scrivener project can be hundreds of files in that folder and they must all be immediately available or chaos can ensue.
Cloud services like Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud etc. encourage you to store all your files in the cloud rather than locally. That is disastrous for Scrivener projects; Google Drive, as far as I understand it, has the even worse habit of arbitrarily renaming files within the project, rendering it un-openable.
These are not my recommendations. There is a support article on using cloud services which gives the full recommendations.
Mark
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great thanks Mark. appreciated!
I use Dropbox, MS OneDrive, and Google Drive for syncing various things.
My favorite is Dropbox. I trust it with my live projects and it has been flawless.
I use OneDrive for my zipped backups and it has likewise been excellent. If I were ever forced to drop Dropbox, I’d keep my live projects on OneDrive.
Google Drive on the other hand is an unreliable, inconsistent mess for syncing. I only use it with apps specifically wired to it for storing their data. (eg. MindMup, Tabs Outliner)
Besides avoiding Google Drive, this is likewise a very important point. For syncing Scrivener project folders, OneDrive’s setting "Save space & download files as you need them must be disabled. The paid plans for DropBox do something similar, but at the folder/file, where you can set them to “online-only”. You should never do this for Scrivener project folders.
On another note–Scrivener’s automatic zipped backups should have been one of the the first things you reached for to resolve your original challenge, so my assumption is that your backup process many need some tweaking. 
Here’s a post I wrote a while ago on syncing and backups. The post was written for v1 so the menu paths have changed, but everything else is still applicable. It would be worth your time to read the backup section.
Best,
Jim
Best,
Jim
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Hi Jim,
Thanks for this! I’ve moved everything over to dropbox. I stopped using backups because my projects were stored on my hard drive and backed up on the cloud. I’ve reactivated auto backups for my projects.
They should have this “user.lock” issue written in bold red letters at the top of the window when the app opens. If I were using MS Word, the computer crash wouldn’t have been a problem.
Daniel
I have to point out that backing up to the “cloud” (which I presume you mean an internet-based sync service). If your backups, on either the “cloud” or “local disk” become “lost”, accidentally deleted, corrupted … that flaw will pretty much instantly sync across to the other device and “poof” your backups are gone. I strongly recommend that you direct your backups to a more secure and non-synced location.
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For anyone else reading the thread, please do not trust any cloud “sharing” service as your only backup for critical data. The whole point of such a service is to share files among computers, which means that a damaged copy on one system will replicate itself to all your other devices at internet speed.
A true backup, by definition, is protected from this kind of accidental damage. Services like BackBlaze and Carbonite are ideal. If you do want to use a sharing service, consider using a different service from the one used for your live projects.
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