Last fall when High Sierra was ready for prime time, I eagerly downloaded it but the installation stalled. So I did what you should never do—I turned off my laptop and restarted. It shouldn’t come to any surprise to tech-savvy readers that I managed to wipe out my entire operating system.

Off I went to my local Apple dealer with my laptop and my external hard drive. When I arrived, I whimpered to the two technicians at the counter, “I think I broke it,” and explained what happened.

They looked at each other and snickered.

“You didn’t break it,” said the taller, older guy.

“We see a lot of this. People get impatient. It was rewriting files and it takes time,” the younger one chimed in.

Later when I returned, the younger technician commented, “You’re last backup was at 9:30 this morning.You’re smart because we see a lot of people who don’t backup.”

I thanked my lucky stars that one of the first things I learned when I first started using Scrivener was where I could find my backups and to also back up to an external hard drive.

In case something like this ever happens to you, let’s review how and where Scrivener backs up your projects. (Note: This post refers to Scrivener 3 for Mac and Scrivener for Windows 1.9.0.7)

All my projects are in Scrivener 3 so when I start a new one, my preference is to save it onto my desktop for easy access. If you’re new to the application (or simply didn’t know), Scrivener has the capability, by default, to automatically save your work after two seconds of inactivity. You can actually monitor this process on both Scrivener 3 and Scrivener for Windows. On Scrivener 3, take a peek at the 'traffic lights" found on the upper left-hand corner of the window. The red button will have a black dot inside it whenever the project contains pending edits. While on Scrivener for Windows, an asterisk appears next to the project title on the upper left-hand corner of that window. When you stop typing or clicking within the project that black dot (or asterisk) will disappear, and now everything is saved to the disk. If you want to adjust this setting for Scrivener 3, go to Scrivener->Preferences->General and select Saving.