Hi all, I am currently using the trial version of Scrivener, and I’d written more than two thousand words on a project over the course of a couple of days last week. I now can’t find this save file anywhere. When I open Scrivener I get the message: “Scrivener project file not found”, and there is nothing in the “open recent project” dropdown.
I must have saved the file originally in order to have reopened it the second day I worked on it. As I understand it, Scrivener also has an autosave function which is enabled by default, so I find it difficult to believe the project was never saved at all.
Any ideas as to why I now can’t find this project, or where Scrivener autosaves? I have used the Windows search, of course, to no avail.
Thanks very much in advance.
Browse to the location where you saved the project using the Windows file browser. Is it there? Are you using some kind of sync service that might be archiving “unused” files to the cloud? Were you using some kind of removable media (thumb drive, network attached storage) for the location of your project?
Those are the things that I would look into first. You’re correct about autosave; Scrivener, before you can even begin work on a project, has to write some files and folders to your hard drive. Any changes and additions to a project that you make are saved automatically after 2 seconds of inactivity (by default), so if you didn’t see an error while you were working on the project, then Scrivener was recording your work to the hard drive. My first assumption is that there is something about your save location that can be made unavailable, and that condition has now happened for part… or all of your project, which consists of the .scriv folder and all of its contents.
There should be a backup of your work. Start up Scrivener so that you can access the menu, maybe opening the Interactive Tutorial project from the project templates chooser window. Then when you have the menu available, look at Tools->Options->Backup, to find where your backup copies are kept. The .zip copies will have to be copied from there to someplace logical, like your Documents folder, and then the .zip file contents need to be extracted before you can open them in Scrivener. But before you do that, try to figure out what happened to the main project folder first, so it doesn’t happen to you again.