Hi, before we start I have read help and I know what the trash is…
I am biting my nails after working for an hour and a half on one scene of a play. I was working in full screen, wanted to annotate a sentence, hit (I thought, shift cmd A) - the entire content disappeared. No undo option available, and auto save meant the file was saved with the scene empty. The scene is still in the binder (with synopsis) not in the trash - I’ve just lost all the text that was in it. Apart from turning off auto save, any way to stop this happening in future (I still don;t know what I did…). Thanks!
Hi again - have just done a reconstruction of the incident. I think what I did was miss the shift key (i.e. did cmd-A - select all) and then hit return, which replaced the entire text with one line break. It’s not looking good. Am now retyping from memory as best I can (and have taken off the autosave) but would love advice on how to make the undo command work!
I’m not really sure what could have happened here… Undo most certainly should work in situations such as this - editing text is registered with undo. Unless your focus was in another pane (such as the inspector, which has a separate undo stack from the main document), but that does not sound like the case… If you can provide more specifics, if there are any, that would help.
Please help! Something similar happened to me. It’s the night before I’m presenting a paper, and I went to my Scrivener REsearch section to grap a paragraph to quote in my paper. I hit (I thought) command C to copy, but the entire paragraph disappeared! I did a comd v in both the scrivener and the word document, and a previous paste from the word document appeared. When I did UNDO, it undid the paste, but didn’t restore the paragraph. I’m desperate-- the original hard to find scholarly text is 800 miles away, and the text is nowhere to be found on the internet. I’ve hunted all through Scrivener. Where could it possibly have gone?!? It’s not in the trash.
Hopefully the project is still open. If it is, trying undoing (Cmd-Z) until the text reappears. While the project is open, Scrivener has an infinite (well mostly) memory of your actions. Remember to have the cursor in the text editing area when you undo. Different parts of the interface have their own undo memories. The synopsis card in the Inspector, the notes area, and so on. Additionally, each document has its own memory (again, while the project is open). So if you make a mistake and fail to realise it until later, you should still be able to recover your work.
All of this emphasises the importance of making periodic backups of your work. See the many threads on the topic that have accumulated in the forum, for further details. Scrivener’s undo capability is quite powerful, and much more than you typically get in an application—but even with that kind of safety net, mistakes can happen.
This is interesting… Having gone back over what I did, I assumed that the reason I couldn’t undo the delete was because it had already been auto saved, but having read the other posts, I experimented with deleting little bits of text, waiting for the auto save, then trying cmd-Z - and you’re right, it does seem to keep the changes in memory even after saving. In which case I’m baffled, as it didn’t give me an undo option during that incident (ain’t that always the way.) In the spirit of Microsoft, I shall blame user error…
A warning to fellow writers: Always watch the screen when you’re using keyboard shortcuts! I’ve made the same mis hit (i.e. just cmd-A) twice since! And I will start using the snapshot feature…
Anyway, the good news is I managed to recreate it (more or less) from memory. And it has not changed my Scrivener fandom. This really is a fantastic package (I was using a combination of three diff bits of software to do all that it does). Thanks!
Hooray~! I found out that I was not in the correct place in the text when I hit the undo~ I got the quote back, pasted it in my paper, and was able to change the world of transnational black studies with my brilliant 20-minute presentation. Thanks~!