Oh no… I know it is a bad habit not to be super-organised and send stuff from scratchpad to the project immediately, but…
I just told Scrivener to “show scratchpad” and it claims it has to create one… It is a project I’ve been working on for (erm) years, and of course there are some notes in scratchpad I WANT!!!
I have the feeling that it might be related to my mess-up with the project being open on two machines simultaneously (sere my previous post about the wandering footnotes), but most important: how do I recover my scratchpad??? Help please…
The scratchpad is just a single folder on your drive, in a specified location no? Has the preferences file for scrivener been changed? (thus moving where the scratchpad sits?) do a quick spotlight search for .rtfd and see if they are about
are you running time machine? if you are then you just need to head in there and find the .rtfd files that made up the scratch pad entries, drop them back into where the scratchpad is pointing now…
Thanks for the quick reply 
Thanks to your help I found that, at least, they have not disappeared into cyber space (the scratchcpad notes, I mean). But here comes the oddness: I’ve been using dropbox for this project for ages, ie.e. it lives in my dropbox folder. And so, I guess, have the scratchpad notes, since there has never been a problem. Now, apparently, they reside in ‘Dropbox’ ‘Scrivener’, but Scrivener obviously can’t find them. I tried and created a new scratchpad, and the first note lives in ‘Documents’ Scrivener Scratchpad Notes.’ Hm… I’d just like to have everything as it was… sniff
Well if the original scratchpad notes live in ‘dropbox/scrivener’ just go into scrivener preferences, general, and under ‘notes location’, hit choose and navigate to ‘dropbox/scrivener’ to point scrivener back at the original location again… logic says that should get you back where you were before all the tears… 
it kind of sounds like the location for notes has been reset back to default… I did once notice a oddity when I swapped machines and I think zapped my plist files…
my scratchpad lives on my iMac which I access via a shared folder (taking care only to open one copy of scrivener at a time )
I’m starting to get tempted with putting my current files into dropbox so I can access them on different machines (including over the air)… but again keeping that dont open it in multiple places
Thanks for all your help, it is really appreciated! I think I’ll tweak these things tomorrow, too tired now , and see how it goes.
G’d night, sleep tight!
Is it possible that you only set up this location on one of your computers? Given that you’re working on two computers, you would need to point each copy of Scrivener to your shared Scratchpad folder, seeing as it is a global, not a project, setting. At any rates, naquada’s advice of changing the preferences to direct Scrivener towards your preferred folder is the solution.
All the best,
Keith
Again, thanks a lot for your help! 