Supposedly Scrivener saves a project every two seconds, overwriting the old project file. To illustrate my problem, I have a project named hyperion.scriv. I also have dozens of files named hyperion.scriv that seem to have been saved at various times. It doesn’t seem that the old files are overwritten. Am I missing something? This is my first question on the forum. and I’m really a newbie, but I have many years of programming experience, including X-Code and so on.
It saves changes after 2 seconds of inactivity (by default).
Those .sriv-“Files” are actually packages, kind of folders, containing multiple files. Are those dozen versions of hyperion.scriv stored in the same location? How’s that even possible?
You may have another issue going on; if you have used Save As to create additional copies of your project in the past, then you have a bunch of older copies of your project laying around.
Let’s say you have My Project and it’s saved under folder A. You decide to Save As, and save it under folder B as My Project. Scrivener will now consider the B/My Project copy as the “live” copy (unless you explictly open the A/My Project copy) and all of your further work will go into the B/My Project version.
So as you Save As over time, especially if you save them in different folders/locations, you can end up with a confusion of project files that seem to be named the same. You have to figure out which copy of your project you are actually writing to, if that’s the case, and that’s the version that will be update by Scrivener’s auto-save.
As November_Sierra said, the auto-save fires off after 2 seconds of inactivity in Scrivener, and will update all the various project components that have been changed since the last save.
Thanks for responding.
The packages are actually named “helicon.scriv” and yes, they are in the same location. I also have dozens of copies of “Tutorial.scriv” in a different location. I actually purchased Scrivener some time ago, but decided to write in Word. I have a couple of projects created later but there are no copies of these. All of the “Tutorial.scriv” and “Helicon.scriv” copies are at least three years old. Interestingly, the copies are dated one hour apart in one case and fifteen minutes apart in the other.
There certainly is something else going on, but who knows what. Using “Save As” is not the answer, unfortunately, as I have not used this feature.
I have no use for these copies, and since such copies do not seem to be happening any more, I think I’ll just delete them. There may have been some weird malware or some such that has been removed at some point.
As of now, I’ll have to chalk it up to magic. I’ll return to this thread if I see it happen again, or if the deletion causes some other problem. Can’t see how it would, however.
Thanks to all for trying to help.
Those sound like backup copies made by some tool other than Scrivener. Time Machine backs up every fifteen minutes by default; might this location have been a Time Machine volume at some point?