I recently downloaded the Scrivener demo and fell totally in love with it.
While I had the demo open I began a NEW project and spent several hours outlining and otherwise creating work that it will not be easy to replicate.
After restarting my computer several times, I’ve come back to Scrivener, only to discover that my NEW project LOADS as the demo project, except with a “Recovered Files” folder at the bottom.
The “Recovered Files” folder is blank. No text. Nothing.
I’m really disappointed and would like to be able to put my trust in this program. Is it the demo that has an issue? How do I get my recovered files back?
The “Recovered Files” folder appears if there has been some sort of problem whereby when Scrivener opens, it finds files inside the current project file that don’t have associated items in the binder (that is, it finds something on disk that doesn’t exist in the interface) - so it places them in the “Recovered Files” folder. This only happens if something happens so that you somehow cause the project to revert to an earlier state, or if there is a saving problem. Are you saving directly to the disk or doing any synchronisation? Did you have a saving problem at all?
For the sake of completeness, here is one possible scenario:
Could it be that instead of creating a new Project file, what you created was new documents (and perhaps folders) within the Tutorial project file (which was already open because you were looking at it)? This happens sometimes to people first coming to Scrivener.
When one first comes to Scrivener from an app like Word, it can take a minute to realize that the relations between projects and documents and windows is different. In Word, a window = a document (and there is no independent concept of a project). In Scrivener, a window = a project file and a project file can contain many documents. So, everything you see within a single Scrivener window (including all documents and folders in the Binder) are part of a single Scrivener project file. If you have more than one Scriv project open at once, they will occupy entirely separate windows.
So, ask yourself how you created your new project. If you used command-N, then what you created was a new document within an existing project file. If you used File > New Project… (or shift-cmd-N), then you created a new project file–and a dialog box would have opened and you would have been asked where to put it and what to name it.
Hope this maybe helps.
–Greg
P.S. The above would not explain the Recovered Files thing.
Thanks all, it turns out that I somehow found two iterations of the same .scriv project on my hard drive. One was a somehow saved-as tutorial project with the blank recovered files, and the other was the new project that I intended to continue. They had the exact same name. I guess I’ll chalk that up to my own absentmindedness, lol.