Windows 10 and Missing Projects

To those of us who think Scrivener may have erased or deleted our precious stuff.

I upgraded to the Windows version of Scrivener. Months went by, and I decided to blow the dust from some short stories I had been cooking up. When loading the stories, all but two were empty. Blank. Deleted. Nada. I felt sick.

For those who have made the jump to Windows 10, here’s how I “recovered” what I thought was forever gone. At the top of your screen, it shows the location of the project. Mine is C:\Users\12089\Documents\Stories\xxx - Scrivener

12089 is the profile assigned to me when I installed the OS. This is where the missing stories had been stored. However, I still had my old profiles from the previous version of Windows: Terry, Public, Default. When I click on any of them, the same folders that appear in 12089 appear also under these older profile folders. I thought they were only useless duplicates taking up hard drive space. Good thing I didn’t delete them, 'cause when I clicked on the Terry folder for Scrivener’s projects, I found all of the stories intact.

Hope this helps some out there. I have two Mac desktops and a PC. Go figure.

1 Like

Welcome to the forums, Ricebug! Note that Scrivener also creates automatic backups of your projects to the backup location specified under File > Options > Backup (or Tools > Options > Backup if you’re using Scrivener 1 for Windows). You’re likely to find a viable backup copy of your project in that folder, so that’s the first thing we recommend when you encounter data loss.

More info on the backup process here: How to Back Up Your Scrivener Projects | Literature and Latte

Always good to know. When you change computers and update the OS, however, it gets a bit more involved. You are not going to find a backup, only pieces of one. But we’re talking Windows. Macs don’t have these issues.