I just purchased and installed the Scriv update on my Mac. When I go into Scrive and click “open existing project,” it’s empty! I read somewhere that existing projects would turn up in a folder marked “miscellaneous,” but there is no such folder. Someone please shed a ray of hope here and tell me my files still exist. (and yes, I know I should have backed up, but I am sometimes stupidly optimistic that things will run smoothly)
I’m not sure about the miscellaneous thing; your projects shouldn’t move anywhere at all. They should all be right where you left them. Swapping out the application itself doesn’t have anything to do with the data files you create in your user folder. If you’ve never really paid attention to where they go, they are probably all in Documents—that is the default save location is. If you don’t see anything there, try using Spotlight to search for .scriv.
Custom project templates would move to the “Miscellaneous” category, but that’s not the projects themselves. Your “Recent Projects” menu just needs to be repopulated, so once you find and open your projects following the above advice, they’ll appear in that menu.
Scrivener 2 uses a different preferences file to Scrivener 1, which means that the “Recent Projects” menu will indeed be empty when you first use it. That doesn’t mean your projects have gone anywhere, though - “Recent Projects” is just a useful quick way of accessing your most recently-opened projects (like a browser history). “Open an Existing File…” brings up the standard Mac Open panel for you to open any existing projects you have.
When you create a project in Scrivener, it is saved as a .scriv file on your hard disk, so all of your projects will be wherever they were before (just as Word documents are .doc files saved on your hard disk). As Ioa says, just use Spotlight to search for “.scriv”, and that should reveal where your projects are if you don’t know - they are most likely in the ~/Documents folder.
All the best,
Keith