One project has either disappeared or been corrupted.
When I open Scrivener, it automatically goes into my blog post project. Not sure why, it’s not the last one I worked on.
When I click on File, Recent Projects it includes American Gold in the list but when I click on it I get the blog post project.
In Docs, I see some of the info from American Gold.
I restored American Gold.scriv from my Carbonite backup to a new folder on my desktop, but when I open it, it has the info from the blog post project.
I’m on Windows 8.1, Scrivener 1.7.1.0. I thought I had updated to the latest Scrivener version but apparently not. I wonder if that’s the problem.
While I do highly recommend updating to 1.8.6, it won’t affect the problem with the project. When you say that opening the American Gold.scriv project “has the info from the blog post project”, do you mean that the document text in the editor is from the blog post, but other aspects of the project (e.g. the list of documents in the binder) are correct for American Gold? Or does is it opening the blog post project, with the blog post project name in the title bar and all the documents and binder as you’d expect for that project?
It sounds like either some project files between the projects got mixed or copied or that at some point one project was overwritten with a copy of the other. Carbonite has come up before as a probable suspect in corrupting projects because of its backup method not working well with Scrivener’s multi-file format. Do you have any backups in another location, or can you access any old automatic backups from Scrivener (even via Carbonite–I’m talking here about zipped backups Scrivener might have made on each project close, for instance, which could have been included in your system backups on Carbonite)?
While sorting this, I’d also start out by making a zipped backup of your American Gold.scriv folder whose Files/Docs folder still had some of the correct files. Just right-click the .scriv folder and choose “Send to \ Compressed (zipped) folder”. Even if the binder file is messed up, we may be able to repair it, and at worst you can still salvage the text documents from the project if they’re safe in a backup.
When I opened the American Gold project, I got the full Blog Post project instead.
Restoring from Carbonite did not work, but after searching the Scrivener manual I found where Scrivener stored its automatic backups. The most recent of those backups was no good - I got a message that the zip file was corrupt.
Fortunately, the backup prior to that was good, and I was able to unzip and access the American Gold project so I’m good now. Thank goodness! Many chapters of my novel are in there.
I’m thinking the most recent backup may have been trashed when my PC would not shut down last Friday and I had to turn it off. I was not actively using Scrivener at the time but may not have exited. I don’t normally close the project I’m working on when I exit. Maybe I should.
How can you exit without closing all projects? You CAN do the reverse, of course, and it shouldn’t really matter … but I don’t leave apps hanging around with nothing to do. Who knows what mischief they could get up to? (Not to mention the memory they don’t release for doing other things.)
Why would I exit Scrivener when I’m just going to another Window to quickly check e-mail or do a bit of research that I might want to save in Scrivener? My problem was caused by my system freezing, and Scrivener’s automatic backups allowed me to recover.