Okay, since I got this new PC (new hotness turned out to be a POC…Asus—just don’t,) I’ve been plagued with black screens, crashes and freezing. Black screens while writing in Scrivener’s split screen mode have been particularly troublesome. Because, much to my dismay, when a sudden black screen forced me to hard reboot, all the text in the active pane was wiped out. I know what you’re thinking, since Scrivener auto-saves every two seconds, not to worry, right?.. Wrong!!!
First, in Scrivener, I opened the project backup and discovered it was current to the previous days manual backup, none of the current work was here. This is not where Scrivener auto-saves. So, using Windows File Explorer, I opened the regular project folder and looked in files/docs folder for auto-saves of the appropriate 123.rtf file (binder documents are saved as numbered RTF files in project folder/files/Docs) and discovered Scrivener doesn’t auto-save there either. At least not when in split screen mode.
Fortunately, after much hand wringing and gnashing of teeth, I had an epiphany, and it was so obvious, I’m embarrassed that it didn’t occur to me sooner (we’ll call it my ‘duh’ moment and never mention it again. ) If Scrivener’s auto-saves weren’t in the project or backup folder, they had to be somewhere else… Duh.
So, in Windows File Explorer, I searched This PC for all files with names corresponding to the outdated one in the Scrivener project’s docs folder….
I don’t get it. Scrivener’s autosave feature means that it saves the project, without you having to click on File -> Save or Ctrl-S, which you have to do in Word. It doesn’t autosave the project somewhere else. The backups it makes is something else, which you can decide when and where and how it does.
But what it does do is to number the different sub-documents, so if you have several long projects you have several projects holding a 434.rtf file.
I’ve had an occasional crash (although it’s unusual on Mac:s) and simply opened the project again and everything has always been there. My guess is that Scrivener simply didn’t know where you were so it placed you somewhere, and if the pane was empty it was because it actually was empty.
Unless you have changed the autosave intervals to a very long interval? Hopefully someone in the Windows crew can shed some light on this…
I think it wasn’t saved in the project folder because when the PCs blackscreen w/o curser, everything stops and you have to do a hard boot, so it doesn’t have a chance to write from temporary memory.
Yes, but Win doesn’t save stuff to swap files as long as RAM is enough, and Scriv handles every little document as a file in itself, and only has to save the file you are currently editing.
It’d be interesting to hear AmberV’s opinion about this.
