I make and preserve manual backups frequently when I work, so this hasn’t been crucial, but on the rare occasions when I close Scrivener and then reopen the program directly (as opposed to opening the project file), it reverts to a much earlier version of my project. What gives??
It could be that you’ve got an old version of the project on your drive somewhere that is being loaded automatically rather than the newer one. We’re going to put in an option that will help with this, it’s already in the public beta, where you can enable full paths to see exactly where the project is. Right now it’s kind of hard to know where a project is coming from when it is already open, and this was a bit of an oversight on our part as it can lead to confusion like this. I think the best way to avoid it right now is to load Scrivener from its icon so that you get the older project, then go and open the project you know is current, from the disk. Now you’ll have both copies open. Close the old one, and then close the current one. Now try clicking on the icon again and hopefully just the current one opens.
If not, maybe something is jammed with the settings. It kind of sounds like it is since it keeps loading this other one even though you’ve been working on the other one at times in between. So I’d be interested to see how that experiment works.
I believe I tried that (having two versions open and closing the obsolete one) before, without solving anything. Just now, when I tried to open Scrivener from the icon after the program was already open, it went to an option screen.
Further weirdness: I usually unzip backups in a different folder from the one where they’re created and stored. When I do that, I can open the project just fine from the .scrivx file, but if I copy that file and move it to the same folder as those other files, I get the structure of the project with every document page blank!!??
Wait, are you saying you’ve copied the .scrivx file from one project folder to another? That wouldn’t work too well! The .scrivx file is just a description of the project, you can think of it as a table of contents. It has a list of the names of things, the meta-data like labels that are assigned to them, and where Scrivener can find the data. Every project is going to have a different thumbprint and so copying one .scrivx to another (even if it is just an older version of it) will blow things up. The whole folder is the project.
Okay, got that. Every time I’ve opened the project for the last couple of weeks, I’ve done it by opening the .scrivx file – but always from a folder where everything else was also. No wonder copying just the .scrivx file and opening it in a different folder didn’t work.
But I guess that doesn’t explain the problem I started with.
Yeah, the .scrivx is the point of entry, but it needs the rest of the data to do much of anything.
I do know that the open-last feature can be a little odd at times. It’s not a clear-cut thing because each window is its own instance, so when you close a window and then another, is that considered a “session”, both windows? Or is it just the last one you closed? It seems to work sometimes one way and other times another. If you find it getting in the way too much you can just switch it off and load the projects directly.
Experimenting, I tried unzipping in the usual location and then copying the whole folder into the folder where backups go – but the result was chaos and confusion. So I’ve unchecked the load-recent option, since it doesn’t work properly, and I’ll continue copying the zipped backup into the unzipping folder and opening the project from there, for now… Still, I’d like to have things more straightforward. I’m a bit afraid that I’ll end up someday with a project I can’t get to.
Just out of curiosity, are you using backups to transfer the project from one computer to another or something of that nature? Typically one wouldn’t need to be accessing them so frequently, but I do work that way myself. I have my backups go up to Dropbox and when I switch computers I grab the latest backup to work on local. Then when I’m done those changes get backed up to Dropbox and are available for the next computer. However when I do this, I’m always very careful to delete the old project (the whole folder) from the local drive first, before extracting the new project from backup. I just find it less confusing that way, and Scrivener won’t try to auto-load anything that is in the recycle bin anyway.
Yes, going from desktop to netbook and back is how I started using the separate unzipping folder as I’ve described. Until the last few days, I didn’t realize I had any problem with re-opening Scrivener, because I was going back and forth so much. Since I’ve used a separate Dropbox folder, I haven’t worried about deleting backups from the main folder.
Oh hey, this just happened to someone in the LInux forum, too. https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/project-still-has-same-file-name-but-text-is-earlier-draft/19831/1
Okay, really going back to making stuffing now.
That doesn’t surprise me as this sounds like a program logic error rather than something that would only manifest on one type of file system or operating system. I wish it worked a little more seamlessly, but getting rid of old versions should help. I don’t mean getting rid of the Zipped backups, those can stay forever, but only having one copy of a live project on your disk can reduce a lot of confusion.
Huh. Was that it? I saw that it was the same thing, but didn’t read too much closer. (Been busy cooking for tomorrow.)