I work syncing via Dropbox because I primarily work on iOS. Suddenly I have lots of the same project that have just appeared in my project list.
I’ve been using iOS / Dropbox for years, but this is a new one for me.
I don’t have any insight as to why it happens, but I do have some tips on how to recover.
Close out Scrivener and put the iPad aside. No point in syncing the iPad half way through the process here. I suggest using an alternate computer (not a phone or tablet) to look at your Dropbox folders. By default Scrivener uses Dropbox → apps → Scrivener to store your projects.
At this point I suggest you download and zip up everything here for insurance. Once you have that done, you can look to last modified dates to try and pare down the dupes if any exist here. Just clearing the extras out here isn’t enough, so now we go back to your iPad. Note: the extra’s might not be here either.
From your iPad (without opening Scrivener) open the Files app and navigate to On My iPad → Scrivener → Dropbox and compare that to what you saw on Dropbox. If you removed anything from Dropbox, locate the match(es) to those files and remove them from here too. That will make sure that the sync process doesn’t replace the deleted projects.
If you were to remove everything here, Scrivener will re-download everything from Dropbox when it syncs next. You could delete these files, but moving them is safer. If you want a quick way to cull-and-save all the local files, rename the Dropbox folder to something else and create a new folder and name it Dropbox. You can use the SELECT button to bring up radio buttons to select multiple files while weeding through what you see here if you are being more selective. You could also move Dropbox’d projects to local and vice versa.
If you back out to the On My iPad → Scrivener folder you might see some projets here too, these are local only projects. I have a second folder called backup, and that was from a problem I had a while back where I renamed the Dropbox folder to Backup and let Scrivener re-download everything from Dropbox after changing hardware. It looks like this:
One last tip: Finding differences between duplicates is going to be tricky and time consuming, but possible. From Desktop Scrivener open each dupe project in turn. Once open go to File → Export → OPML file… and export with Titles and text, export the entire binder too.
When saving make sure each duplicate has a unique filename, you’ll need to keep track of these, and make sure you group them together based on the original projects. After you have all of the dupes exported, export the original version of the project too, and we’ll treat that as the master copy.
Next, you’ll take these OPML files and load the master and a single dupe into a Difference Checker[1] And then you can evaluate any differences and either reject them from the dupe or incorporate the difference back into the master project, keep going until there are no more differences to judge then save the resulting master branch. Rinse and repeat (again with the now-updated Master branch and one of the leftover dupes) until you’ve gone through everything.
After all of that, go back into Desktop Scrivener and create a new project, then Files → Import → Import and Split… and select the master OPML file. This will be pulled into Scrivener and will use the embedded structure to recreate the binder of your previous project with all of the edits you incorperated into the master branch. All of the Top Level Binder items will appear above the Manuscript folder, so you will have to manually move the various folders that exist outside of the Manuscript Folder (Research, Templates, and so forth).
And at long last, you’ve concatenated everything down to a new file to get started again with what you need to do.
This site used to be a lot cleaner and was free, seems they have changed. There are other tools to find, and even stand alone offline Diff Engines that could be leveraged to do this too. ↩︎
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On your desktop, check Scrivener’s Backup settings. Is Scriv set to put backups into a Dropbox folder? Is it the same folder your live projects are in, namely the very same dropbox folder your ios scriv has been told to look in? In which case either your backups location setting has been changed for the worse, or the folder ios scriv is looking into has changed for the worse.
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Yeah I thought that too, but my backup folder is set to a OneDrive location, so that it wouldn’t conflict with Dropbox. Thanks for the feedback though 
Wow amazing help @Dain, thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed, helpful reply.
What’s strange is that the time stamp on all the files were 17.24, so it’s not like it was an incremental back up over a period of time. So far it looks like they’re all the same, i.e no differences between the various scriv files for each project.
Almost as if something suddenly ran to generate all the duplicates.
Are your backups compressed to zip files ?