I don’t even know the right terminology for this problem. Is it a crash or is it a bug? On Tuesday 25th May all the text in the boxes of my Scrivener 1 doc disappeared, leaving only chapter and scene headings. I then bought Scrivener 3 and on 26th transferred the text from a 2 day old compile with the loss of 3000 words. Today 28th the text has disappeared from the Scrivener 3 boxes. There is nothing in Trash. I will have to use yesterday’s compile to recreate my doc, but will this then happen again?
What about the backups Scrivener creates regularly. Have you looked at these? If you still have the backups, it should be easy to reconstruct your project and perhaps loose the work of an hour or two.
When you say “all the text in the boxes of my Scrivener 1 doc disappeared”, this is notreally precise enough when a developer tries to analyze what happened and how to help you. What exactly do you mean by “boxes”? Scrivener documents? Windows? …
And what exactly did you do the moment before the text “disappeared”. For a support person or software developer it is important to know the circumstances under which it took place. Imagine, this is like solving a criminal case. The more facts we have, the easier it is to find out what happened. So, the more you can tell us, the higher the chances that someone will be able to help you reconstruct your work and to prevent it happen again.
Hi,
New here. Glad to see there is a forum for us.
Was this ever resolved? I have the same problem. Created something in Scrivener 1. Last looked at it in March. Now I’m on a new computer, have updated to Scrivener 3 and am working remotely with my files from MS OneDrive. I opened my project and (oops) said “yes” to update it to Scrivener 3. Now there is no text. I have all of the sections, but there doesn’t seem to be any content.
This might be that OneDrive hasn’t yet pulled down all the related folders? Or is there an issue with the update?
Hoping someone has an easy fix, or at least can explain the relationship between the project file and the content files so that I can confirm about what has or hasn’t been downloaded locally yet.
Also hope this post makes sense. 
All the best,
-Scott
I had a very similar problem a few weeks ago. I was working on a project on Scrivener 1. One day I opened it to find I had all the sections and their titles but no content. I had a recent compile so I upgraded to 3 and manually copied all of my project into 3. I never found out what happened to the text that went missing.
This is the most likely issue. The index used to build the binder (the .scrivx file) is separate from the files containing your actual writing. Scrivener expects the entire contents of the .scriv folder to be locally available. Having “empty” files is a very common result when a cloud service (not just OneDrive) makes the wrong decision about what files to download.
There have also been some reports with Scrivener 3 specifically being quarantined by antivirus software and therefore not being allowed to access its data.
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Thanks for this.
I have been able to confirm that my actual writing is still in Files/Docs and all has now been downloaded.
However, in the actual Scrivener project the writing still isn’t showing.
Is there a way to re-connect the pieces?