Today a temp.bak file was created and placed into my Backups folder. What worries me is that I didn’t experience any sort of crash or problem with Scrivener, so I don’t know what this means, and looking at its contents doesn’t really tell me very much. I save my book to my Skydrive folder so that I can access it at home and on my laptop when I’m not home. I don’t know if this could have something to do with it? I’ve never had any problems with that arrangement before.
The thought that is now going to keep me awake at night is am I at risk of losing my work? As far along as I am with my book, if I made a couple of small changes somewhere in the middle of one of my chapters, it would be almost impossible to know if I’d lost them during some sort of system glitch. I keep backups and back-up my backups, but there comes a point where you can’t second-guess Scrivener - you either have to trust it or not. Right now, I’m thinking that I just don’t know for sure whether or not I do? 
Anyway, back to this temp.bak folder/zip file - what is it?
Thanks,
Mark
Well, here’s a quick update - I’m 95% certain that I haven’t lost any recent edits to my book. I’m still curious about this temp.bak file however… Does anybody know what it is or why it was generated?
Thanks,
Mark
Scrivener creates backups with either a .bak.scriv extension or a .bak.zip extension, depending whether you’ve chosen to compress automatic backups. If you’re not viewing file extensions in Windows, the .zip ending would be hidden, but you’ll still see the zippered folder icon, so it sounds like that’s what you had here. Was it just called “temp.bak” or was it “ProjectName.temp.bak” (using the actual name of your project)? Was it created when (and in place of) your normal automatic backup would have run, e.g. if your projects are set to automatically backup when closed, did the temp.bak file get created at that point but not one just called ProjectName.bak? Was anything else going on at the time, like Windows installing updates or any kind of freezing or such on the computer?
I’m not terribly familiar with working from Skydrive; I don’t see immediately how that would have affected creating a temp file in the backup, unless it opens the file in an unusual way. What’s the full file path of the project? (You can view this easily in the window title bar in Scrivener by enabling the setting in the General Options tab.)
Did you actually open it in Scrivener, i.e. was it a full project backup? Or did you just browse it in Windows Explorer?
The filename was: temp.bak2013-07-01T08-08.zip
It was dropped into my regular backups folder with my other backups, which do have the project name.back…zip format.
My regular project backup .zip files are almost 700KB, and the temp.bak was only 8KB. I extracted it to look and it had a blank project.scrivx file along with a Files, Settings and Snapshots folder - those had very little in them.
It really gave me the impression that it was a recovery file of some sort, like from a program crash, but there just wasn’t much there. I do create backups at close, but this was created a few hours before I actually closed the project.
The full project path is: D:\SkyDrive\Scrivener\my_book_name
SkyDrive monitors that hotfolder and when it sees a change, syncs with the cloud. Now, as you can imagine, I was leery of this at first, knowing that Scrivener is almost constantly saving the project and every save triggers a sync, but this has been a flawless process in all the time that I’ve been using it (most of this year).
Thanks,
Mark