A strange thing happened today. I opened up Scrivener, saw the familiar book project in front of me and thought... hang on. This is an old version. I knew that not just from the text but from the date on the scene (another handy Scrivener feature). Where's the recent one?

Ever happen to you? I'm not sure how this occurred. I don't blame Scrivener. It's doubtless my fault. The culprit lies in something you'll see in more and more software you see these days. A seemingly attractive feature that offers to open up your last document every time you launch an application.

<!--more-->Sounds good, eh? No more rootling around the folders to get that book file. Just open the app and you're there. Which is fine... so long as the last file you opened is really the one you want. Somewhere along the way here I must have done a save as or something. Things got muddle. The version I was editing <em>wasn't </em>the right one.

Yikes. Panic. Well, not really. I back up everything twice. Once to an external drive when I'm at home. And once using <a title="Getting safe automatic backups with Scrivener" href="http://davidhewson.com/2011/01/getting-safe-automatic-backups-with-scrivener/">Scrivener's file facility to Dropbox</a>. So to recover from this all I needed to do was go back through the backup files on Dropbox. Sure enough the latest backup there was the real thing. Up-to-date and in the shape I expected. I just copied it back to the correct location and got on with things.

Oh, and then made a change in Scrivener prefs...

<img src="data:image/png;base64,[encoded data, 36484 characters]" alt="" />

<img class="alignright" src="data:image/png;base64,[encoded data, 35360 characters]" alt="" width="88" height="153" />Now it won't reopen the last project I had open. Instead I just dragged the file of the work in progres to the documents section of the dock.

I only work on one book at a time usually so this works fine for me. When I want to open Scrivener I click on the file icon, not the app. If by accident I do click on the app it won't open a file at all. So no more accidents, hopefully.