Scrivener 3 is on the way…

Posted by Hugh
Dec 4, 2017 at 06:12 PM

As I’ve written before in this forum, I lost 40,000 words in MS Word about ten years ago. For some reason, the back-up was lost too. It remains probably the worst thing that has happened to me in my computer-using life.

Around that time there were several pieces on the Internet about the risks of corruption using particular parts of the Word user-interface, and instructions on how to protect one’s work from such a fate. My loss was simpler; one moment I was able to edit my work, the next moment it was gone, and gone for good.

To be fair to Word, I had previously used it to put together more than one report containing upwards of 80,000 words plus numerous Excel charts and tables. But, as they say, once bitten, twice shy.

Hence the initial attraction to me of Scrivener and, for me, its most fundamental virtue: damage to one Scrivener document need not destroy the whole, because a Scrivener project is composed of a folder full of separate files. (I didn’t know then that a Word “document” is also a package of files, but working in a different, possibly less robust, way.)