Hi! So I’m pretty sure there’s no fix for this, I’ll just need to start over, but I thought I’d ask anyway, because it’s never happened to me before and I don’t want it to happen again.
So I was writing in Scrivener a little while ago. My computer was running on battery power, and it stopped warning me of low battery a long time ago (that’s an issue for a different forum). I thought I had a little time left and got wrapped up in what I was writing–just one more sentence, you know how it goes–but I waited too long and blink screen goes black. Annoying, but usually not a big deal, so I plugged it in and turned it on to get back to work.
Scrivener automatically saves so frequently that I’ve never failed to pick up exactly where I’ve left off upon opening the project. Except this time, the project opened exactly where it was supposed to, but there were no words on the page. The little icon by the title had dots on it, so it thinks text is there, but the cursor won’t move. At the bottom it says there are 254 characters, 0 words. I realized I might have lost what I’d written today, but that page had text on it for weeks, it should have at least shown me where I’d left off last night.
All the other pages seemed fine, text right where it was supposed to be. I shrug and go to the backup folder, find the most recent document (I only worked on one thing in Scrivener today, never clicked away, so that had to be it), and open it in Word. All I see are two pages of ▯. I close out everything and open everything back up again. No change, except now the same backup document is five lines of ______.
I searched Google but couldn’t find any evidence of a similar incident, so here I am. Did I corrupt the file somehow or what?
If you actually went to the backup files, you should have noticed that they ended in .zip. Word does not open .zip files. Zip files contain your entire project. All the files in your project and the entire directory structure. Word would have been confused and after scratching its head, shrugged its shoulders and put up a bunch of “I’ve got no idea” symbols.
However, you can open a zip file or extract them to a subfolder. From there you could find the files folder and sort by date. You can probably find the single file you worked on and restore only it. If that fails, and it might because the backup is of the whole thing and the associations may not be the same, you can restore the entire backup. Instructions are in the manual.
I have the Mac version so I’ll wait and let Windows user comment on the details, but two things immediately:
when you use a backup, copy and rename it and then open the renamed version, so you don’t overwrite your backup if something goes wrong again.
did you have the live project only on your own HD or also on a cloud service? If cloud, which one?
When something appears to have gone bad for me, I make sure that the bad files are not uploaded to the cloud service (Dropbox) by turning off the WiFi on my laptop and then stopping the automatic syncing that the Dropbox app otherwise will do. I can then turn on WiFi, open a web interface to Dropbox, duplicate the whole folder and rename the duplicate so I know what it is, close the web interface, return to my laptop, turn on the Dropbox app and let it sync the new, duplicate project to my laptop, and go on from there.
I have two external hard drives where I backup all my files. It would have had an older version of the file, but I neglected to backup last night, so the other hard drives wouldn’t have had the latest text anyway. Luckily, I’d only lost about 1000 words, so it won’t take me long to rewrite. I was just curious if anyone knew what had happened.
I do not use the cloud. The cloud makes me nervous, because I do not understand it.
steveshank, my scrivener backup files aren’t zipped. There is one zipped folder, but it’s just templates. All the other backup documents open just fine in Word. I can post screenshots if you like.
OK. So, what are these “backups” you have? Do you make them? Does Scrivener make them? Under Tools/ options / backup - you have automatic backup for scrivener. It also allows for multiple versions to be kept. With Automatic selected, you could have 3 or 5 or 10 previous versions backed up every time you open or exit the program or even manually save. Are these what you are using or are your doing something of your own?
What was the extension of the file that didn’t open properly in Word? under your scrivener files you have a folder with the project name, then a subfolder of files, then Docs, then some numerals, and extensions of .rtf. Those are your article files. Was that what you tried to open? Do you have previous versions of that file?
Easiest to show you, but it’ll be in parts because I can only attach 3 pics at a time.
I’m one of those naive people who trusts a program to function correctly without me having to go in and switch a bunch of settings–because I wouldn’t know what I’m doing. I mean that sincerely, without snark. I save files to my laptop hd and copy those files to external hds. Other than that, I’ve never created backup folders for anything, never even messed with the backup feature that comes with Windows. Any backups I know of are the ones the program makes on its own behind the scenes.
So here’s the missing page of text in Scrivener (which I have since moved to the trash). I noticed as I was taking these screenshots that in the sidebar it says the page was last modified 8/30, but it had definitely been modified since last Wednesday. It’s like the file itself got confused.
Open Files. (I did directly open the backup project file No Apology Book Reviews.bak5, but the page of missing text appeared the same as in the first picture.) Open Docs.
First the practical. If that was backup 5, try backup 4. File 183.rtf should be the same. Did the crash occur during backup? It does seem that file is hosed.
Second. Change your settings in File manager (or windows explorer) to show the file extension. This is important as a safety issue as well as useful information for understanding what you are dealing with. The document files should be .rtf while the synopsis files should be .txt
If your computer is unreliable (or even if it isn’t), you might add the backup option to backup when you manually save. If you do this, you also might want to add more backups since if you save two or three times in a long session, your backups will go 2 or 3 times less deeply into the past. Simply press CTRL-S to manually save and that will automatically make a backup as well as saving.
Do not check the option to backup on open. Perhaps someone will tell me why this is sometimes a good idea, I’ll bet there is a reason, but it scares me. If a file gets screwed up like yours, and you backup on open, then the backup is no good. Why make a backup before you work? I do understand that the previous backup should still be OK, but I still don’t like it.
Finally, since you have at least 3 problems: 1. System crashed, 2. File one got hosed. 3. File 2 got hosed, there is a possibility that your drive is having issues. So I suggest going to a command prompt and entering the command: chkdsk /r and pressing ENTER.
You will then have to reboot and wait a couple hours as the drive scans every sector to see if they are readable. If there are some bad sectors Windows will attempt to recover them and mark out unreadable sectors so they aren’t used in the future.
Good tips! I already CTRL+S compulsively, especially when I pause to gather my thoughts.
I checked the box to show file extensions, though I didn’t see any .txt. I must not use synopsis pages in scrivener. I’m not even sure what a synopsis page would be?
I don’t get the point of backing up when project opens, either. I’ve never had that option checked.
Coincidentally, I checked my drives this morning (I had to reinstall one) and they’re all up to date. My computer didn’t necessarily crash, the battery died, like a hard reboot. I’m disinclined to think it’s a driver issue.
Scrivener has saved/worked fine since; I’m pretty sure it was a freak accident and an isolated incident, but I’m glad to have had this discussion.
I used to do that too, but if you open an article and look at the title at the top, and press the space bar (or anykey) you will notice an * after the name. When it disappears Scrivener has done their automatic save. So when you stop to think, scrivener which is even more compulsive than we are, has already saved the article.
If you check the manual save option, then the entire project will get backed up when you ctrl-s, so you’ll want to do it less frequently in order to drop back further in time.
As I understand it, opening a project in Scrivener – even if you don’t add a single character – can cause changes in the project (the settings that store your per-document cursor location, for example). By having this option checked, you can preserve the project before going in to do a reading pass without messing things up, AND without having to have two copies of the project .scriv package floating around to get confused.
Somewhat obscure use case, but could be invaluable for customers who are editing/reviewing projects by other people, people passing Scrivener projects between themselves (such as a writing workshop), etc.
