In the meantime, my own situation was simpler than I’d feared.
Two of the three projects that were duplicated on the iPad hadn’t been worked on for weeks, so they were identical to the ones on Dropbox. I just deleted the iPad duplicates.
The remaining project—where the current version was on the iPad—only needed to be selected and moved to Dropbox (after renaming the older version already resident in DB).
This is why I need to compile often, and print often!
I actually ran into this issue myself today. I don’t have a solution – hopefully the update Ioa mentioned will do that – but here’s how I approached recovery:
There was no precipitating incident that I can tell. Last night, syncing worked as well as it has for months, this morning, blammo. The only thing I can think of that changed is I used a different WiFi network, which later proved to be unreliable for other things, too.
Step 1: Don’t panic. Everything on the iPad will be safe on the iPad unless overwritten from Dropbox. So move everything to the ‘On My iPad’ area of the project list.
Step 1a: Proceed no further until you have a connection you trust and time to wait for data to transfer. Trying to resync your entire iPad with a flakey connection and/or when you’re in a hurry is not advised.
Step 1b: If you were smart, Scrivener on your desktop machine is safely shut down, and you can assume everything on it is synced to Dropbox. If that’s not the case, do so before proceeding. This will also keep any data on the desktop safe from Dropbox misfires.
Step 2: Unlink Dropbox. It will offer to save local copies. Do so if you haven’t already.
Step 3: Relink Dropbox. This will download all of the projects in your Dropbox/Apps/Scrivener folder to the iPad, so it may take some time.
Step 4: In my case, there were five projects altogether. I knew that only one of them had been changed on the iPad, so I just deleted the local copies of the other four.
Step 5: If you aren’t sure which version is current, you can compare them side by side on the iPad, or use the Import and Merge command on the Scrivener 3 desktop. In my case, I knew the iPad version was newer, so I deleted the Dropbox version and dragged the iPad version to the “On Dropbox” area of the Project Screen, Let everything sync.
Step 6: Be Alert for further difficulty. I ended up with two copies of the project on my Mac, one of which was corrupted. It was easy to identify the damaged one, and I just deleted it, but I might have had more problems if I hadn’t been paying attention.
Katherine
I hope someone can help me because I got all fouled up by this syncing bug. I’m running 3.0 on my MacBook and 1.1.5 on my iPad. I’ve got the latest version of my project on my iPad. I renamed it and it automatically synced with Dropbox (or so it said). When I try to open it on my Mac I can’t find it in Dropbox. Any idea what I’m doing wrong? Thanks in advance!
Bob
Make sure Dropbox on your Mac is actually running. The latest High Sierra update had a tendency to silently disable it,
Katherine
Thank you! Sometimes the answers are so simple. Appreciate the help!
Bob