Save and back-up Issues

I’ve got intermittent (over the last few weeks) save issues with Scrivener.
I’ll describe what happened today in detail as an example.
I’m running it in Windows 7 on C drive on an HP Netbook.

I discovered on opening it after a break that my last document hadn’t saved.
I went to my back-ups and discovered that the back-ups for today had no doc folder under the file folder. (when this problems occures the back-ups are always like this).
I recreated some of my document, saved manually and backed up. The back-up again had nothing under the doc folder. The save failed (I could tell from the time stamp no documents had been updated and my “New” document wasn’t there).

I tried save as. This saved the new document I was working on but nothing else. (i.e. when I opened the saves as it only contained a single document not the rest of the my scrivings)

I eventually resolved the problem by closing down the netbook and restarting.

This has happened a number of times over the last few weeks and I now take a compile at the end of each session and save that as an additonal back-up. Any ideas? :neutral_face:

I’m so sorry you’re experiencing such a problem! Thank you for the step by step through what you’re doing and the results. Are you getting this constantly now, where files aren’t saving, or is there any pattern you’ve seen distinguishing when the saves do work and when they don’t? As of the last several updates, Scrivener writes to a temporary file first while you’re working, so it’s possible that there’s a memory issue here causing a problem or a permissions error preventing the writing in the first place.

Could you please check the following?

  • Hard drive free space: Open Windows Explorer (Windows Logo Key + E) and right-click on your local disk drive where the Scrivener project is saved and choose Properties. How much free space is reported in the General tab?

  • Available RAM: Open the System Information window by right-clicking on the “Computer” item in the Windows Explorer list (parent of the C: drive) and viewing Properties or by using the shortcut Windows Logo Key + Pause key (also labelled Break). What’s reported for the Installed memory (RAM)? (Also, while we’re here, what’s the processor speed and system type?)

  • From that System Information window, click the “Advanced Settings” option and enter the administrator password if necessary. This will open a System Properties dialog, focussed on the Advanced tab. Please click the Settings button at the top for Performance, then in the Performance Option dialog that opens, click on the Advanced tab. The bottom section here is on Virtual memory: what does it give as the total paging file size for all drives?

What else you’re running at the time will also affect memory–do you notice for instance that the times Scrivener fails to save, you’re also running a bunch of other programs, or some heavy-duty memory hogs?

If you’re willing, installing the free Acronis Drive Monitor may help diagnose problems writing to the hard drive, as well as performing general hard drive healthy checks. You can read about it and download the tool from here: http://www.acronis.eu/homecomputing/products/drive-monitor/#overview.

I’ll make sure the developers are aware of this thread, so please report back as you get a chance. We’d definitely like to get this issue resolved as quickly as possible!

Thanks for the response.

It happened again this morning - no other programs running.

I’d done text work (1000 words) and it didn’t save. But it did save some new file structures and their synopsis data (they didn’t have any text).
The back up files it created last night were fine but the one it created this morning only contained a single rich text file which wasn’t the one in question.

Answer to your question:
Hard Drive 126 GB free

RAM 2.00 GB
Intel® Atom CPU N455 @1.66GHz 1.67GHz

Virtual Memory Paging 2035MB

I’ll install the program you recommend.
It seems to happen less often if I close Scrivener when I come out of it (instead of letting it sleep or hibernate) and close windows.

Thanks for your help