The background: I’m running Scrivener 1.2.6 on Ubuntu 10.10. Most of the bells and whistles don’t work and frankly never have, but I haven’t cared–even the baseline Scrivener is far and away the best program I’ve ever used for my writing.
Now the trouble part: Old habits die hard, and I often do a “Save As” and rename my project to include the day’s date to differentiate it from older files. I opened my project as usual this evening to discover that the same project name I’ve been using for the past couple of weeks is now an incomplete draft! An entire item is missing, another item is missing over 2K words of draft material, and several other items have reverted to “First Draft” status (when I’d already edited them and changed their status to “Revised”). This isn’t a simple case of “somehow my work last night didn’t get saved.” This is a full reversion to a different file, which omits weeks of work. I have yet to figure out what this reverted file is–whether it’s one of my “Save As” files or an internal Scrivener backup of some kind. The problem is that it still bears the name of my most recent project!
I’d have worried I was losing my mind (not to mention my work), except that I always compile my work as an rtf in an entirely different folder as extra protection. (Like I said, old habits die hard. I’m used to Microsoft products destroying weeks of work on a whim.) I’ve checked my compiled file, and sure enough, I’m not crazy. My current project name is now, somehow, conjuring the wrong file entirely.
Has anyone else had this issue? Is there any way to figure out how this happened (and how to avoid it in the future)? In case you’re wondering, I’ve tried to use Snapshots before and the results were hinky, so I haven’t used it in months. This is strictly a “Save As” issue.
Any advice you can offer would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!