I’ve been working on the same Scrivener project for years, on Windows 10 (latest version of Scrivener), without any problems. But this morning my computer shut down on its own while I was using Scrivener because it was out of battery, and when I plugged the computer and started it again, Scrivener would no longer open this project that’s always worked correctly. It opens a “new project” box, and when I select the old project with the “open existing project” button it doesn’t react. I tried rebooting the computer several times, I even uninstalled and re-installed Scrivener, turned the project into a Zip file to try to export it and reopen it… Nothing works.
Would anyone know what’s happening? It’s not the first time my computer has shut down while I was working on Scrivener, and usually it doesn’t cause any problems.
Thanks! (Note: I’m not very tech literate)
Have you taken a look at your automatic backups? If you have a recent backup that opens nicely, the quickest and easiest thing might actually just be to take that and use it as your new live file.
You can find your current automatic backup location by opening Scrivener and navigating to File → Options → Backup → Open backup folder. Since you’ve done a fresh install of Scrivener, it’s possible you previously had a different location set, so don’t panic if you don’t see anything in the current folder. In that case, please try searching File Explorer for .scriv or the title of the project and see what you can turn up that way.
If a backup doesn’t end up being a good option for you, we could look at other troubleshooting steps for the problematic file next.