My project that I’m working on is not saving properly, for some reason. I work for a few hours, even backing up manually during this time here and there. But when I return to the project the next day, often the project is blank, or says “incompatible” and won’t open. I do not get it!
My understanding is that Scrivener automatically backs up! Right?? I don’t have to “save” during the project?
Only the fact that I am so paranoid that I do a separate text backup (strictly cut and paste to my word processing program) has saved me from losing a TON of work. I have a couple examples of files if you want to look at them. One is totally blank, the other “incompatible.”
Where is your project saved? Keeping it in a synchronized folder like OneDrive or Google Drive could be causing problems, especially if you are accessing the project from different machines. If nothing like that is in play, do you have any automatic backup or security software running that might be regularly copying or syncing files to an external drive or server, such as WebRoot? Something like that could be corrupting the project by touching the individual files in the project folder, and you could probably exclude your Scrivener project folders from the files it monitors to prevent the problem.
Scrivener auto-saves regularly, which is just like hitting Save; it overwrites the file with the latest changes. So no, you don’t have to manually save while working, but understand that this is different from a backup. It’s not a separate copy of the work. Scrivener does also back up the project each time the project is closed, and it saves the five most recent backups. You can change the settings for this under the Backup tab of Tools > Options, so that for instance you could trigger a backup any time you used Ctrl+S and could save all backups rather than having older ones roll off.