Scrivener 3.4 crashing anytime I attempt to open any of my files

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
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Hi all, for the last few weeks Scrivener has been extremely laggy and prone to freezing. Yesterday, the app ceased opening my files all together, including all back-ups. At this point, I’d like to shift to using word instead of Scrivener, but I can’t even retrieve my writing to export.

I’ll lose a large amount of work if I cannot retrieve these files. Has anyone had any similar issue or know a way to retrieve my work?

I have the most up-to-date Mac OS system and Scrivener 3.4 for reference. No amount of restarting seems to be helping.

I’d greatly appreciate any support.

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Hi sarou, and welcome to the forum.

If these issues occur in a few Scrivener projects, I recommend that you reset Scrivener’s preferences to see if that will resolve this.

This Knowledge Base article explains that process.

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Hi Ruth. Thank you for the quick response. I have followed all steps in the guide to reset the preferences, and unfortunately when I try to open one of my files, it still freezes the Scrivener program and the files do not open.

Are there any other resolutions that have been found successful in the past? I looked over the recent entries but didn’t see anything recent that mirrored what I am seeing.

Thank you!

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If resetting Scrivener’s preferences didn’t fix the issue, please try holding the Shift key while asking the Mac to launch Scrivener. You’ll need to keep the Shift key held until Scrivener fully loads.

That will prevent the Mac from opening any projects automatically. Scrivener should show the new project templates panel. You can try opening the Interactive Tutorial from there.

Are you able to open the Tutorial and save it? Or, does Scrivener freeze again?

The Tutorial is a reasonably complex project, so it’s a good place to test how Scrivener is behaving without using your own work for the testing.

If the Tutorial will save, you can add some text to it and close it. Are you able to open it again?

If the Tutorial behaves, you can try opening one of your existing projects. Does it load now?

If the Tutorial behaves but your projects do not, we’ll need to consider where your projects are stored.

That is, are they in a cloud-syncing service like Dropbox, iCloud Drive, or OneDrive? If so, have you changed that cloud service’s settings so the projects are available even if the computer is offline?

If that’s not a factor, we’ll review what the projects contain.

Do your projects contain a lot images, PDFs, styles, or fonts and colors?

Those can all affect a project and cause crashing behaviors. Particularly if they’re paired with a cloud-syncing service if that service defaults to “online-only” settings.

If the projects are mostly text, what other third-party tools, security settings, and other programs are you running?

I’m thinking of anything from an anti-virus program to Keyboard Maestro, Raycast, Alfred, BetterTouchTool, ProWritingAid, Grammarly, Hazel, CleanMyMac, and so on.

Those programs could be affecting either Scrivener’s operation or trying to access the project when you’re opening it.

If you’re running a lot of those tools, you can log into your Mac’s “soft” Safe Mode and test Scrivener’s behavior there.

To do this, please log into your regular account with the Shift key held down, right after you put in the password, and hold Shift until your Mac finishes loading in.

This is a “soft” safe mode, all it does is keep the Mac from automatically loading software and background utilities. This mode has it start without access to Dropbox, no keyboard enhancers, no font managers, etc.

This Apple Support page has more information on using Safe Mode.

You can test how Scrivener behaves in this mode and then restart into your computer’s normal operation.

That comparison could be helpful in narrowing down what’s occurring.

By the way, I’m throwing everything–including the kitchen sink–here because we’re still working on a significant holiday backlog in the help queue.

Because of that, I may not be able to drop back to the forum for a bit, and I wanted you to have some additional options to test in the meantime.

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Hi Ruth,
Thank you again for your response and guidance. I am not able to open the Tutorial. It initially opens a screen asking me to click “Continue” to choose where to save the tutorial project. When I press “Continue,” I get the spinning wheel for a while, then the pop-up closes and nothing opens.

I also tried uninstalling and reinstalling the Scrivener program, but I am still unable to open the Tutorial.

I appreciate your support. I see on the sidebar there is an official support channel which maybe is more appropriate for my inquiry. I will submit a ticket there as well and can report back any solution I receive.

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Is this happening when in macOS “Safe Mode” as suggested by @RuthS ?

Sometimes booting with macOS “Safe Mode” fixes issues with the operating system, which based on the symptoms you report, may be the issue. Just a hunch.

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Hi rms,

Yes, I have tried it in safe mode and Scrivener still crashes trying to load the Tutorial.

Sarah

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Update that I had my Mac reset and that seems to have solved the problem, allowing Scrivener to load. However, the files I was working on say they are corrupted and when restored, have lost the last week of writing I’d done. About 10k words lost.

I’m very disappointed as I thought Scriveners set up was supposed to be very hard to corrupt as its a folder of .rtf files. When I go into the individual text files, half of them show as empty folders. It’s all gone.

Lessons learned, I guess. I had thought Scrivener was backing up any time I saved my file, but apparently it was only when I closed it, which I don’t often do if I am on a writing binge.

Scrivener is much easier for organizing early drafts, but it’s not worth it if its so easy to lose progress. Maybe Word is a safer program to use.

Thanks for trying to help.

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Yeah, but the wrong ones.

Even if Scrivener would somehow corrupt your project (it doesn’t), or your Mac suddenly catches fire, it’s virtually impossible to lose more than one hour of work. Just restore it from your Time Maschine backups.

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Scrivener has two manual backup commands you can use, even if you leave the project open for extended periods.

The first is File > Back Up > Back Up Now and prompts Scrivener to create an immediate backup of your project in your default backup location.

If you’re in the habit of leaving your project open on your computer, I recommend using that command either just before you make a lot of changes to your project or right after doing so. Or, if you increase the number of backups you’re saving, you could do both.

The File > Back Up > Back Up To… command will allow you to direct where that backup is saved. This can be a handy way to make a second backup copy on a USB drive, a cloud-storage account, and so on. It also allows a user to either ZIP that backup or leave it uncompressed as needed.

I also recommend reviewing @kewms’s post Got a backup? for best practices on protecting all your most critical data. Including your Scrivener projects.

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I unfortunately do not have Time Machine set up, but have all my files saved to One Drive so all should be secure on the cloud. However, when i open the Scrivener files, it gives an error message that says it either didn’t close properly or is currently in use. When I make a copy and open it, my recent work isn’t there.

When I go into the scrivener file itself, half the .rft files show as empty folders.

If there is anything I am missing that would allow me to retrieve the work that should have been repeatedly saved to the file that it says didn’t save properly, I would be eternally grateful.

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My take on this is twofold:

  1. If you are someone who leaves your computer running and Scrivener open for days on end, then Back up Now two or three times a session—depending how long the session is—would be, to me, a sine qua non. By leaving it running for long periods, Scrivener is not going to make backups, so if anything goes wrong…
  2. But, in spite of the fact that we are told we can safely leave our computers running with apps loaded over extended periods of time, I just won’t go with that. Every night, I close all apps and then shut down my computers—the only app that I sometimes let the computer close down is ForkLift, everything else I shut down first. The point is that in closing the apps and shutting down the computer, a lot of ‘housekeeping’ goes on. If you don’t shut down over extended periods, ‘cruft’, stray fragments of code which can later cause unexpected behaviour, end up clogging the system. Shut down, and it’s cleaned out.

I think I have left my Mac Mini running overnight twice in the last couple of years: once because I was so tired I just went to bed, the other time it was doing an OS update and I didn’t want to stay up the ½ hour while it did it. And in 18 years of using Scrivener, I can’t remember ever losing anything.

That is all apart from backing up regularly to external disks.

:slight_smile:
Mark

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Hi everyone,
I appreciate all the notes to backup more often and shut out of the program and even the computer more often. I’m definitely taking that away as a lesson learned.

That said, @November_Sierra’s comment that Scrivener doesn’t corrupt the base file implies that if I still have that file, the work should be retrievable. I do still have that file, and I’ve heard this many times that Scrivener is very hard to corrupt. It’s part of why I bought it.

That said, the file itself gives the mentioned error mention when I try to open it, and many of the inside .rtf files display as empty folders.

So please tell me what I am missing or if there is something else I should be trying because I would be extremely grateful to restore the work.

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So you saved it in the worst possible place (short of Google Drive) and have no backups at all. But somehow it’s Scrivener’s fault? :thinking:

You’re missing backups. You could try to move your project outside of OneDive (and any place resembling a cloud) and maybe the “empty” parts will be downloaded this way.

But quite frankly, I’d send the project directly to the Scrivener support and ask for help.

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Hi there,

I realize it not Scrivener’s fault that I misunderstood how often it was backing up, nor are they responsible for the claims from users I had read that the .rtf files are retrievable and difficult to corrupt even if the full file won’t open. I’ve taken the lessons learned to back-up more and will do it manually from here on out if I continue using the program.

Regarding your comment, to me, opening a back-up when an original file becomes corrupted is not the same as the original Scrivener file not being easily corruptible. We may just have a language difference, and I trust you meant well when you said it.

In the past using Word, I have been able to restore prior versions of a document even if it became corrupted between creating backups. This does not seem to work with a Scrivener file.

I appreciate the suggestion to try sending the corrupted file to Scrivener support. Otherwise, I’ll start working on the lost pieces from scratch.

Thanks all again for trying to help.

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It’s indeed not same. The backup is just a lifeboat (and a pretty good one) in the unlikely case that you lose data, not some kind of patch meant to cover up the tracks of a somehow “unsafe Scrivener” (for lack of a better word).

I’ve never seen a corrupted Scrivener project (but I’m sure the support team has) outside of two scenarios:

  1. “Empty documents” caused by cloud-sync / “space saving” shenanigans.
  2. Users copying single files out of the Scrivener project (happens more often on Windows, since they see the Scrivener “file” as the folder that it actually is).

Usually in those cases the “lost” data is still there (“in the cloud”), just not here (on your computer) and can be retrieved. And if not, there a the automatic Scrivener backups. And Time Machine backups. Or should be.

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If you are seeing empty folders in the project structure, the most likely reason is that the data has not been downloaded from your cloud service to your local computer. If the cloud service still has it, it can (usually) be retrieved by telling the cloud service to “make available offline” or something similar.

To other participants in the thread, please have enough empathy to recognize that this might not be the best time for an extended discussion of backup practices. Please help the farmer recover the horse before lecturing him about the barn door.

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