Stupid mistake the program let me do.

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
1

I am not asking for sympathy, or even help, but I thought I would illustrate a stupid moment for idiot proofing the program.

I was working in the blank template, the research binder. I had filled the binder with similar info, so I created a folder named for the info and determined to move the research material to that folder. I selected all the boxes in the research section and intended to drag them to the new folder.

I slipped and the boxes (9 selected folders) went to “untitled” where they disappeared. Of course I didn’t have a backup of the file (my fault).

I think it would be prudent for there to be something to warn the user in this case.

I have discovered that if I “ungroup” untitled I can find the files. If view it as Scrivenings I seem to get most of the text in a long file.

Also the backup was working and I was able to go to an automated backup - thanks all

I think I would have preferred a warning.

Sigurd.

2

In Scrivener, any item in the binder–folder, text document, image, whatever–can contain subdocuments. It sounds like you accidentally dragged your selection onto the “Untitled” document, making them subitems of that document. A disclosure triangle should have appeared beside “Untitled” so that you could expand the group and see all the subdocuments, which would then make it easy to select the items and move them to where you’d really wanted them. The document icon also changes to display as a document group (stacked papers, rather than a single paper), as another indication that the item has subdocuments.

The Scrivenings group view mode shows the text of all a container’s subdocuments, with dashed divider lines between each document. The items are still individual documents in the binder.

A warning wouldn’t really work since dragging and dropping items this way is perfectly legitimate, the problem just being that in this case they were accidentally dropped in the wrong place. If possible in the future we would like to make an easy “Undo” action for this sort of scenario, but there are technical difficulties that have prevented that so far. So currently you need to manually “undo” by moving them from the wrong location to the correct one.

In addition to drag and drop, you can use the Document > Move menu commands and Ctrl+Up/Down/Right/Left shortcuts to rearrange binder documents.

3

My recommendation to fix problems like this:

Make Undo work for binder changes.

I’ve often done something I didn’t intend when dragging/dropping in the binder.

4

I second the “undo” option for moving/dropping folders. Sometimes I have a little slip of the mouse (touchpad) and drop files into unknown folders. Then I have to hunt for them in subfolders. This can be cumbersome when you have a lot of folders…

5

I would also like to see an ‘undo’ for binder changes and I seem to think that existed in a previous version of Scrivener. Also it should be harder to move documents in the binder. Mine seem to move of their own accord. I think what’s happening is that the file name is selected because I’m looking at that document and then something I’m doing with the mouse is being read as ‘drag and drop’ by the program because suddenly the document has moved and I don’t know where it originally came from. I’m writing a book and I have had to number every document in the binder (currently 137 documents) so that I can tell where it came from if it moves by accident. This has definitely got worse since the last time I wrote a book - maybe since I upgraded Scrivener, not sure.