Not Saving

So the other night something weird happened with Scrivener, my word processor. I finished my work, backed it up to Dropbox, and went about the rest of my evening. Next night, I opened Scrivener, and discovered that none of the new writing I’d done the previous night was anywhere in the file.

I checked the time stamp, and the file had registered no updates from the time I first opened it. When I hit “save,” nothing happened.

I very much doubt that I’d forget to save after hours of writing, and in any case I’m pretty sure that Scrivener automatically backs up the file every few minutes.

I checked the backup on Dropbox, and the file had the same omissions as the original.

After performing a number of frantic and useless actions, I remembered that Scrivener automatically saves the file when the file is closed. I’d never seen any of these backup files, and I presumed they were hidden in some little Scrivener folder somewhere. A search of the hard drive located these backups, and I discovered they were in ZIP files.

When I tried to open the latest file, I got a notice that opening a ZIP file could result in some kind of catastrophic alterations to the text. But what did I have to lose?

I opened the ZIP file and found all the missing text from the previous night, which I copied and pasted in my original file, which I then saved under another name. It actually saved! Yay!

But now I have to wonder what the hell all that was about. How often does this glitch turn up? Dare I trust that my work will be saved when I try to save it? What’s going on?

{Note: I’ve had to close comments here due to an inundation of Cyrillic spam, but maybe I’ll leave comments open for a bit just in case one of you has some answers.]

{UPDATE: thank you for the comments, which for some stupid reason are not displaying. I’m having too close comments again because the Cyrillic spam is starting to flood in.]