Hello everybody;
ok so there’s this project I was working on, and in the research section I created a table so that I could organize my characters and their relationships better, and I really worked on it hard and came up with brilliant ideas. Then work came along so I did not have the time to go back on my writing until yesterday. The beta I was using had expired by then, so I downloaded the March 21st one, and opened my document this morning, only to find that something was odd with it. The writing on the Synopsis card on the upper right corner was smaller than usual, and worst of all, worst of all, my table that i had so carefully concentrated on was reduced to one column and a few lines. There was no writing in any of the lines save for the title in the single column. I am trying not to freak out, but I want to know this: where has my work gone, and more importantly, can I get it back? Is there a way to recuparate it as it was or is this somehow a lost cause? And also, did this happen because I downloaded a new beta, and if so, will it keep on doing that whenever I download a new beta?
Thank you for your time,
A desperate writer on the verge of panic and massive, unforgiving writer’s block.
The font size on the index card is easy to change. You’ll find options for card fonts in the Corkboard option tab. It’s set to 10pt Courier by default, which does look to be a bit small on most monitors, and stresses what Courier as a font is capable of shrinking down to. Perhaps 12pt would be a better default. Since the card content is plain-text, this change should show up immediately in all of your projects.
On the table problem, if you have a backup copy of the project, would it be possible to send both it and the project with the damaged table to support AT literatureandlatte DOT com? If we could determine what broke, that would help avoid this sort of thing in the future. But generally speaking, no, you shouldn’t be losing tables just because of a beta update—that isn’t an expected thing.
Thank you for the issue on the table; I figured it couldn’t be something that drastic. But regarding the file itself and the table; I always saved whatever progress I made, having had bad experiences with lost projects in Word. But as for an actual backup, I don’t think I have one. Does saving it come down to the same thing as making a backup, or should I have actually manually made a backup? Because if it’s the case, it sort of means that I don’t have a backup. Is that right?
If that’s the case, is it impossible to recover it?
Thanks,
Day
Hmm, yeah if you’ve never used either the Snapshot feature, or the File/Backup Project To... menu command, then there will be no backup. Like most programs, Scrivener just saves changes right over the original file—once you do that, the original file is gone forever unless you have some other external backup that you run periodically on your entire computer.
If you did take a snapshot, open the Inspector on the file that has the table and click the button at the bottom that looks like an old fashioned camera. That will display any snapshots you have available. This is the preferred way to handle in-project backups. It’s good for when you edit something heavily, because you can view the old version right in the Inspector and even roll back to a prior version of the document.
I do recommend making periodic manual backups too, though, with the aforementioned menu command. It’s easy to do, only takes a few seconds to complete, and having one of those a day can really save your sanity.
We could take a look at the table file itself and see if there is some obvious glitch that will fix it.
Allright, thanks a lot.
I will send you the table then, see if there is anything wrong with it that can be undone. How exactly am I supposed to send it to you guys?
Thank you again,
Day
Best way to would be to use File/Backup Project To... to create a zipped copy of the project and then attach the .zip file to an e-mail. If this produces a huge file though (more than 10mb is hard for e-mail), then the best thing to do would be to find the actual RTF file in your project’s Files/Docs folder. Since these have numbers instead of names, this can be a little tricky. Easiest way to find a file is to add something to it in the binder that you don’t ordinarily use. Say, if you don’t use synopsis much, add one to that file and you’ll get another .txt file beside the .rtf file with an identical number. This will make it easier to spot. You can also add document notes, or create a Scrivener link. Any of these three will generate an additional file, and if you don’t use those features regularly, it should be the only one with a .txt, _notes.rtf, or .links file along side it.
Once you find it, drag a copy of the RTF out to your desktop (make sure Scrivener is closed) and attach that to the e-mail.
Okay so what I did is this:
I was going to attach the file, having zipped it and everything when this happened: I was running the program Undelete Plus to recover some lost music on my computer when a couple of files came up on the computer that I thought I had lost. Basically, I found, in there, a few Word documents that contained some earlier versions of what I had compiled in the lost table. It’s not exactly the same thing, but I think that I can work with that, and from there recreate the table that I lost.
It was a close call after all, but at least now I’ll know to backup my story no matter what. I guess it must be a glitch or something, so I hope this can help you fix it before it happens to anyone else.
Thanks a million for your time,
Day