I have been working on Scrivener (and doing the Tutes etc) for about 6 weeks. I am still at the character building and plotting phase and had made substantial progress in this phase of my preliminary work - I had also done a LOT of preliminary research. (Links, setting photos, etc). Things were getting rather messy so in my infinite wisdom I decided to “tidy things up”. SO… Everything had previously been saved/mapped directly to the Scrivener icon on my desktop. But I stupidly thought it was a good idea to create a nice new directory structure under a folder called “writing” under my “Documents” directory and moved all my scrivener folders into it. Now when I open up scrivener it says it can’t find them. I even tried to type in the new “address/directory structure” but to no avail…
I definitely didn’t “delete” anything but something “catastrophic” appears to have happened. I am terrified to do anything further in case I make things worse. Can anyone tell me if my situation is retrievable? I wish I could say I will get over it if this is the case but I fear I am going to have a meltdown before I do…
Any help would be gratefully appreciated.
thanks
Kathy
If you use the windows file browser to navigate to your project(s) and then double-click on the .scrivx file in one of them, does Scrivener open the project?
I am stumbling around in the dark trying to check what I did and whether its “fatal” or “retrievable” without touching anything further and I have established two further things…
In Windows File Manager I went into the “subfolders” and “date modified” tabs and I can see
a) Some (but definitely not all) scrivener files have been saved and converted to RTF files and
b) Something called a UI file of the configurations setting type has been changed.
Not sure if this is relevant or helpful but I thought I would mention it.
Thank you
Kathy
Navigate to the ProjectName.scriv folder (where ProjectName is the name of YOUR project)
Double-click that to open it.
Inside there will be:
Files
Icons
Settings
Snapshots
ProjectName.scrivx
Double-click the ProjectName.scrivx file to open it. Make a small edit, then Save and close Scrivener. Now re-open Scrivener and see if it loads the project. If not, open it again manually, then File>Save As with a different name (add a number to it, or something) and Scrivener will know where to find it again the next time.
Thank you Tomwood and Rdail - your help was enough to stop me totally freaking out because it gave me hope that it was fixable so I carefully described my problem on Airtasker and voila… within 10 mins a woman in Melbourne (I am in Brisbane) came on line who is a screenwriter and Scrivener user and a former Microsoft help desk person - so although its going to cost me a bit to sort out - at least I have learnt a VERY valuable lesson … and I wont be doing anything quite so rash in the future and I will be working out how to do back ups ASAP… !!!
First, I just want to say that in the U.S.A. we have no Airtasker. Reading this, I deeply wish that we did!
Second, there are ways of arranging work and folders on your computer to get along with Scrivener’s own specific and necessarily inflexible structures. What I do is to create a folder in Documents\Writing with the name of a specific project, say, Essay. In that folder I place such things as images I may want to use, notes I took at a workshop, links, etc.
Then, in that same folder Documents\Writing\Essay, I create a Scrivener project called “Essay.” This generates a subfolder Essay.scriv, and within that folder there appear the subfolders that Tomwood indicated, including the actual project file Essay.scrivx. Then when I open the Scrivener project “Essay”, I can upload/import images, etc., from the folder Documents\Writing\Essay, since they reside at the same level as the Scrivener project subfolder Essay.scriv, rather than within it.
I hope that’s clear enough to make sense, and might be adaptable to your purposes.
in Windows 10.