“There was a problem saving the project. Not all recent edits could be saved. The project will now close”. This is the message I get immediately after opening my project, and for the life of me I can’t work out how to solve it. I have recently opened Scrivener on a new user account on my MacBook Pro, re-entering the registration code, etc. Day One of my New Year’s writing resolution and I’ve already hit a tech issue! Any ideas would bag you many, many karma points.
There are a few things that can cause that error to appear, but it really just means that for some reason the software was unable to save your work, and so it shuts down to protect you from writing unsaved material. The solution is to figure out why the project will not save. Since you mention recently starting a new user account, it could be that in the transfer the project’s permissions were not reset to the new account, meaning one or more components of it cannot be saved. Try using the following checklist on the closed project, and see if that resolves the issue:
- Select the Scrivener project in the Finder that you need to fix.
- Use the File/Get Info menu command with it selected.
- Expand the “Name & Extension” section if necessary, and change the name so that the “.scriv” is completely removed. The icon will become a normal folder a moment after doing so; this is quite okay, it is what we want.
- Expand the “Sharing & Permissions” section if necessary and click the lock icon in the lower-right if the icon is in the locked position.
- Type in your password.
- Set the “yourname (Me)” row to something other than Read & Write.
- I know, seems dumb, but now set it back to Read & Write—we just needed to do that to activate an ability for the next step.
- Use the gear menu to “Apply to enclosed items…” and confirm the warning message.
- Go back to the “Name & Extension” section and add “.scriv” to the end of the name.
It should go back to having a project icon. Double-click on the project to open it, type in a word somewhere and pause for a couple of seconds to let it auto-save. Hopefully that works!
This worked like a charm. Thank-you so much for the clear explanation, and your general patience when answering questions like this.You truly made my day.