I have a folder in my binder called “contacts.” It had about 600 (precious!) words in it last I looked. I haven’t closed out of Scrivener in days, and I saw the text in this folder, intact, yesterday. Now when I click on the folder, it has nothing in it. The “options” button shows that it has 621 words, 4056 characters (that is greyed-out though). What am I doing wrong? How do I retrieve my text? All my other files and folders seem unchanged. If I accidentally selected all and deleted (though I cannot imagine how I’d have done that) can I restore it? The "general meta-data’’ button says it was last modified a few days ago, and I have used it since then.
Is this text that is part of the folder (that is, the folder item itself contains the text and has a document icon overlay in the binder)? It sounds like you’re viewing the folder in outliner mode but it contains no subdocuments, so the outliner is blank. Switching to text editing view (View > Document) should reveal your words, in that case.
There were also a couple reports where documents weren’t loading correctly, although the text files were fine and the word count was displayed; it seemed to be a memory issue, and relaunching Scrivener fixed the problem. Your mention though of the grayed out count in options definitely sounds like the wrong view mode, though, because that isn’t available in the document view. I might be misunderstanding though where the text is missing from.