help!

[Aisling Withershyns]

dear Y writer group.... i have used ywriter for at least 15 years... i started writing a novel when my son was born. i had it on an old PC.. i quit writing for a couple years after like 100 000 words.. just short of finishing.  my kids are now saying you should finish what you started... so i planned to copy my  old hard drive files onto my current laptop...problem is i waited too long ..lost my flash drive with everything in it etc etc... since i dont know what im doing with computers i downloaded ywriter 7 and when i tried to find the ywiter 5 files it says its empty.. i think i deleated my project..

after a panic attack i signed into one drive and found that some of my stuff was saved in the cloud.  i can see files but the appear to be RTF files in word.. 

when i try to extract them to ywriter 7  it says it fails 

can anyone tell me what to do?  

[Simon Haynes]

A yWriter 5 project consists of several parts - one part is the YW5 file, and the other is the RTF5 folder in the same location which contains an RTF file for each scene.

So those RTF files you can see contain all the scene text, but there should also be a YW5 project file in the parent folder.

These days I recommend people copy the YW5 file and RTF5 folder into a new, empty folder, then open the YW5 file with yWriter7 and immediately convert the whole thing to the newer YW7 project format (which is everything self-contained in the one file)

The conversion is non-destructive, and afterwards you can move the YW7 file into its own folder so you don't accidentally open the YW5 file again.

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[KM Lafferty]

Hi Aisling,

I will add to what Simon said by saying that all is not lost if you can't find the YW5 file because, as he said, the actual content of your scenes are what is in the RTF files. Now, the thing is, they may be out of order, and that is what the YW5 would do, put the scenes in their appropriate chronological chapters for you (amongst other things). 

If you can't find that YW5 file, well, just open up the first RTF file which will probably be RTF_00001, and read it.  RTF_00001 will be the first ever scene you wrote in your story. This means if the first scene you ever wrote was a scene that happens in Chapter 15 half way through your story, you have some detective work to put all the contents of the RTF files in story order. If the first scene you wrote was the opening scene, then hey, you have found your opening scene. Either way, copy and paste the content of the RTF file into your word processor of choice, and then open RTF_00002 and read that one. It will be the second ever scene you wrote in your story. If you're lucky and you wrote the second scene of the story straight after you wrote the opening scene, now you have the opening two scenes of your story fixed. But if it was a scene towards the end of your story, just copy and paste the content into your word processor of choice again but leave a gap and maybe a note above as to approximately where the scene comes in the story, and then keep opening RTF files and pasting them into your word processor until you have opened them all and pasted them all in around about where they should go.

Hopefully you have most of the RTF files you ever created, or even all. So you see, your story is not lost without the YW5 file, it just needs a bit of putting back together.

KM

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ywriter/CAN0R%3DkShyaBD5hFvY7jfyMAO1LpxzQKd5v1ER50bYG6n_C%3DY1A%40mail.gmail.com.

[Simon Haynes]

You can also start a new, empty ywriter7 project, add a bunch of chapters, then drag and drop 10-15 scenes at a time into the scene list for each chapter. It's probably easier to discard and drag/drop scenes into the right order that way.

However, there should definitely be a backup of the yw5 project in the Autobackups folder, next to the RTF5 folder.  The program does at least one per day, and the newer ywriter7 does one every 15 minutes every day the program is running. (And 1-5 minutes per scene)

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ywriter/CAK%2BQS2kak6x%3DRJE44OCL74MLD7VTacgVgSyz0rOgQm9R4TUccA%40mail.gmail.com.