I’ve been seeing a lot of support tickets recently along the lines of “I opened Scrivener and all my projects are gone. What happened?”
While we do sincerely try to help in such cases, Scrivener is almost never responsible.
For starters, Scrivener can’t edit projects that aren’t open in Scrivener. If a project that you haven’t opened in six months is gone, it’s not Scrivener’s fault.
Scrivener’s saving operation is fundamentally very simple and hasn’t changed much since version 1: You specify a location on your disk. Scrivener saves the project there. Then it makes a backup according to the settings you give it. Short of a catastrophic disk failure or lack of space, there is very little that can go wrong.
But then cloud services happened. Cloud services at their most basic are pretty benign: they upload copies of files to their server, allowing you to share them with other people (or your own devices) or just have an extra copy. Fine.
What isn’t fine is that most services have some form of “smart sync” capability, in which they “save disk space” by storing some files only on their server. If a file isn’t stored locally, Scrivener can’t open it. In theory, the cloud software sees a request for the file, downloads it, and serves it to the user so fast that they never notice it was missing. In practice, well … not all internet connections are equally reliable. “Smart” synchronization is currently the number one cause of data that appears to be “lost” (but usually isn’t), which is why we strongly recommend configuring your service to “keep files downloaded,” or “make available offline.” Consult the documentation for your service to find out how to do that.
But it gets better! If you have two cloud services running on your machine – iCloud or OneDrive and Dropbox, for instance – they can both try to synchronize the same project, with catastrophic results. If iCloud has “helpfully” “optimized” a project off to their server, Dropbox won’t be able to see or synchronize the missing files either. The solution is to make sure that only one service is allowed to touch any given folder. Unfortunately, the relevant settings are often buried several levels down in various menus and may change between versions of the software.
It’s a moving target, which makes it hard to offer specific suggestions. There are a few principles to remember, though:
- Always know where your projects are. Local drive? External drive? Cloud drive? Any of these can work, provided that you know that’s what you’ve done. Know how to find things via Finder/File Explorer.
- Always know where your backups are. I recommend using ZIP backups, which protects them from accidental editing and also ensures the parts of a project stay together. Check your backup settings and make sure they match how you work.
- If you make a copy of a project for any reason, give it a unique name. In particular be cautious with the “Save As” command. The File → Backup → Backup To command is a better choice for most uses. (Save As makes a copy and then continues working in the copy. Which is a common cause of confusion.)
- Don’t trust the Recent Projects menu. If you save a project to an external drive, then remove the drive, Recent Projects will still point to it. Then when you try to open it, it won’t be there. If in doubt, use Finder/File Explorer.
- Don’t trust cloud services. Read their documentation, understand how they work, and watch them like a hawk. Never rely on a cloud service as your only backup of critical data. Read this, and any advisories for the service you use. Using Scrivener with Cloud-Sync Services / Cloud Syncing / Knowledge Base - Literature and Latte Support
- If you have a problem, investigate it immediately. I mean drop whatever you’re doing and figure it out now. Not only will it be easier to remember what you did, but there’s less chance of overwriting old backups, rolling off the Dropbox version history, etc. (Corollary to this: if you’re trying to recover data, make copies of everything first. Don’t risk overwriting a good backup or otherwise making the problem worse.)