I wrote about 3K words and my computer crashed - no reason, it just died on me. When I reopened the Scrivener file I had been working on for the better part of 2 hours, the entire story was there EXCEPT THE CHAPTER I HAD BEEN WORKING ON. It didn’t just erase the words I’d written that night, but that entire chapter I’d started working on two days prior.
I have tried the FILE folder and I have tried the BACKUP folder. They have everything, but not that chapter. It’s as if it’d never existed.
I’m really hoping someone here has a miracle cure for this because I really don’t want to rewrite the entire thing. Please, help?
Do you sometimes use File->Save As to create a copy of your project before continuing to work on your project? Perhaps you were accidentally working on that copy instead of the main project file, but after the crash you went back to the original.
Another option is to search the project folder using Windows explorer, using any phrase or word that might be unique to the contents of your missing chapter. A crash might have caused Scrivener to lose track of that file in the binder, while the actual text file in the project is still there.
Try creating a few blank documents; older versions of Scrivener would re-discover the text that way, though I don’t think that works with newer versions. But newer versions of Scrivener should create a folder for files it discovers in the project folder that it didn’t have a record of… maybe you missed the presence of such a folder?
This was actually helpful. I have found the chapter I was looking for - but every time I try to open it, all I have are 7 Word (Open Office, actually) pages with #####.
I don’t know, but maybe the support email available at the main site is a good option; you could send those individual files to see if they can salvage anything.
Another option: create a blank project, and drag those files from the windows explorer into that project’s binder, importing them. Maybe Scrivener can read them. If that works, you can drag them from the binder of your temp project back into the main project.
My assumption is that you’re running on Windows Scriv v1.9.16.
If your PC is prone to crashing, be sure to enable the safe document saving mechanism. Tools > Options > Check the box for ‘Use safe document saving mechanism’. When you check the box, a window will pop up and tell you what the feature does. The short version is that it was developed specifically for situations such as yours, where the PC crashes. It uses a saving mechanism that has a higher probability of retaining the latest changes to the currently active document. In your case, the chapter you were working on might have survived the crash, without you having to go scrambling trying to restore it.
Also, see this post I wrote a couple of years ago for another user on Scriv’s zipped backups. Everything I wrote then is still applicable now. You may already know this stuff, but providing it just in case.
