Lost files in Scrivener sync

Mac & Windows (Desktop)
#1

Hi Friends,
I’m not panicking because I saved a different scrivener file as back up, but because this mistake was (too) easy to do, I’m hoping to understand what happened. I was working in the Spreadsheet view and saw that Book 1 and Part 1 items were listed at the top of my chronology, so I deleted them, figuring the items were gone, not the entire folders. I got the are-you-sure message warning me that items would be deleted from Scrivener too, but figured that this was just the document title, not the actual folder and all the contents. I was wrong. When I went to the Scrivener project, everything was gone, and there was nothing in the trash. To add insult to injury, all of the events previously created from the Scrivener sync are still there in AT–it’s just that my Scrivener project–my actual writing was trashed. Phew that I saved elsewhere, but like I said, this was an easy mistake to make.

So where does this stuff go, and is there a way to retrieve it for someone who didn’t think to make a backup?

For the record, I followed (or think I followed) all the set-up instructions with narrative, and deleting the things I didn’t want to be syncing, which I thought included titles like Book 1 and Part 1.

Advice about what I might have done wrong either in set-up or in understanding this would be welcome. I confess that this experience makes me wary about going too far into this partnership with Scrivener & AT.

Thanks!
–P

#2

From what I can understand it looks like you have discovered a bug. If you delete Book 1/Part 1 items in Narrative view or Outline View, where they clearly contain other nested events, it will delete the item and all its nested content. However we agree that it doesn’t make sense to do this on views where you can’t see the nested narrative structure, such as Timeline View or Spreadsheet View. However this is what is happening at the moment, so when you deleted Book 1 from your project, it deleted all of the events that it contained in the Narrative.
We will create a ticket to fix this so that other users don’t have the problem.

In terms of what happens if your documents in Scrivener do accidentally get deleted in the syncing process, deleted files should always be moved to the Trash folder in the project, so we are not sure what happened in your particular case. If you find you can reproduce this, and the files deleted do not go to Trash, let us know, as it is not something we want happening to other users

Otherwise Scrivener does have its own backup system, which would also be helpful in this circumstance.

#3

Thanks @jess, and apologies for the slow follow-up to your reply. I’m glad a ticket is in. When I have a bit more time, I’ll try to reproduce the situation, scary as it is, even knowing things are backed up. Thanks much!