Book Review Club discussion

I've been using Scrivener for about six months now and it's made a world of difference for me. No, I'm not trying to sell you anything. That said, this week I had a major IT issue and since I work for myself, I'm my IT guy. So I complained to myself a lot.

Anyway, I was forced to do a system restore and set everything back to factory settings, losing all of my programs. I have several back up copies that I keep, such as a thumb drive with my writing on it that goes with me wherever I go.

I also have a pair of external hard drives and I also backup Scrivener to Dropbox. The company I work for has their own cloud for me to back up to as well.

So after I get everything back up and running I went on to Dropbox which is where the auto backup is set to and that would have the most recent version of my book.

I had (notice the past tense) set to save as .zip files. When you open the backup you're presented with a list of files, one of which is the Scrivener copy of your project and when I opened the file, there was no text in my scenes.

The folders were laid out properly and there were the correct number of scenes per the chapters I've written, but no actual words. So, I yelled at my IT guy.

In case some of you use Scrivener and have not run into this problem, here's the deal. After you open the Scrivener project file, open the 'Files' folder. See all those .rtf files? Yep, that's your work. Well, most of it is, because a load of those .rtf files are just Scrivener crap so you'll have to find the first file of your work.

I did manage to discover that they do seem to be saved in the order of their place in your book. So chap 1, scene 1 was the 41st .rtf file in my folder, chap 1, scene 2, was 42nd and so on.

If you leave it to back up as .zip you may want to make a note at the head of each scene because if you're restoring from that backup you have to copy and paste each scene back into the chapters.

However, if you remove the .zip option from your auto backup, it will save a regular file with everything right where it's supposed to be.

If I can prevent just one person from having to yell at their IT guy, I've done my job. Oh, and the near heart attack at seeing an empty project where all those hours spent writing vanished.

And I did manage to locate the most recent version on an external hard drive so no cut and paste for me. :-)

Take care everybody,

Sacha

I've only just seen this post. I love Scrivener! But you're right knowing that the work is all in rtf files can really help cut down on wasted time panicking.
I had a similar experience when I had been syncing between my pc and laptop and got conflict errors. It took me a few days to realise and while it wasn't that many words, they were words I was convinced I could never repeat them again! (me? drama queen? never...)

So my add to this thread is go the rtf files, you'll see the 2 conflicting rtf files and the one scrivener is currently using.