The Scrivener Folder in Dropbox pathfile Apps/Scrivener turned into a scrivener formatted document

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

I hate to make a post about another Dropbox Scrivener linking issue, and I always work to do all the research I can in order to avoid asking for help. But I’ve gotten myself into a hole I can’t get out of, and I made a lot of mistakes and changes to get here. I’ll try to make my issues as brief as possible.

I copied a ton of text from my iPhone notes into Scrivener 3, I then erased the contents of the note and deleted it after. This means I cannot recover it from the deleted notes folder of my phone, I knew doing this would bite me in the ass as I was erasing it. Returning to the file in scrivener I noticed the text I pasted was not there. I have no idea what happened but I went to look for the back up versions on my desktop. None of the 5 copies backed up contained the text I was looking for (I’ve changed the number of backups to 25 since). I upgraded to Scrivener 3 some where in between and before noticing the missing text, so this may have played a part in losing the file.

I went to Dropbox to see the history of all the backed up files and downloaded a copy of each one to my downloads folder. When I went to open the file I received the following error message.

''The project at “PATH FILE” seems to be of an older format, but no binder.scrivproj file could be found inside it. It may be missing or corrupt, possibly because of a problem with the device on which it is stored, or because of a synchronisation problem.
Try ctrl-clicking on the project in the Finder and selecting “Show Package Contents”, then look for a file entitled ‘binder.scrivproj’.

It would then place all the downloaded files into the trash bin, no matter which directory I put them in.

I uploaded the files to Apps/Scrivener in dropbox, then made an attempt to open them. After a few error messages the Scrivener Folder changed to a scrivener formatted document, as seen here:

imgur.com/5hD2faz

When I click on the document through dropbox I can still see all my files, but I am unable to link to the files from my scrivener program. I receive the following message when I attempt the file that used to be the scrivener folder.

imgur.com/5hTP9kV

How do I proceed?

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From what I can see, all you need to do is edit the “Scrivener.scriv” folder name in Finder and remove the “.scriv”. That is causing macOS to consider the whole folder a package format. It’s not really though, and it hurts nothing to change the name so that it ceases to be considered as such.

It sounds like what happened here is that you were using the Dropbox website and downloaded some .scrivx files, which aren’t projects. They are important parts of a project, to be clear, but by themselves they are just the binder information.

So when you take a .scrivx file and put it in a random folder and try to load it, Scrivener attempts to “repair” the folder it is found within by adding “.scriv” to the folder file name—in this case your entire sync folder.

We’re adding some additional checks to ensure that won’t happen unless the rest of the folder truly resembles the internal components of a project. But I suppose for the main thing to be aware of is that nothing is damaged or lost—you’ve just got a situation that is confusing your Mac into thinking an ordinary folder is a project—and meanwhile that will confuse the iOS version because from its perspective the “Scrivener” sync folder no longer exists.