When I searched for information about using Scrivener with cloud services, most of the support articles were from 2019. A lot has changed in the last six years with OneDrive, macOS, and Scrivener. I already have OneDrive and iCloud Drive, and I don’t want to add another cloud-based storage service (Dropbox) if I can avoid it. I work on both a Macintosh and a Windows 11 laptop and would like to be able to keep my project on one service.
Are there still the same issues with syncing and how OneDrive and iCloud work as they were six years ago?
Yeah it hasn’t come up much on the forum, just like iCloud Drive hasn’t come up much on the Windows forum. I suspect the reasons are similar: they are both still very bad, off of their original native operating systems, so nobody is using them. But I don’t have much to go on by that, other than speculation and second-hand reports (iCloud for example sound exceptionally awful on Windows).
We had an explosion of problems being reported when Apple cut off the ability for third-party developers to run sync the way they want to, and maybe that scared most people off. Microsoft had to adopt Apple’s infrastructure, just as Dropbox did a bit later, and neither has benefited from that, but there is more of a driver to use the latter given the iOS version.
As a Scrivener user, I find it concerning that both platforms are now trying to move the local documents folder from local storage to their respective cloud services by default. Windows 11 offers to keep your desktop and documents, as well as settings, consistent across all devices by storing them on OneDrive. Apple offers to store all documents and your Desktop in iCloud.
This is an important consideration when setting up a new computer if you’re using Scrivener. Whereas before, we had multi-terabyte physical HDs, the use of smaller SSDs (512 GB to 1 TB) in base configurations makes this almost necessary if you have a lot of large files.
Multi-terabyte physical drives still exist, and are still the option I would personally recommend for large scale storage.
As we have said repeatedly, we do not recommend using any form of “smart” synchronization with Scrivener projects. Scrivener expects the entire project to be available on the local drive.
You aren’t subject to their whims. Don’t use mainstream sync services if it concerns you. I don’t. Local storage is dirt cheap, to the point that you can probably buy multiple terabytes on a regular basis for the cost these so called services charge per year. And if you want sync on top of that, there are good alternatives out there.
I do not use the cloud services for primary storage, since I often do not have a working internet connection here. I dislike that Microsoft handicapped autosave by making it only work with OneDrive. I wish I could still autosave documents every five or ten minutes to my local drive. I’m fortunate that I have a 4TB SSD in my system. I’m also a 40 year IT person. I also have several OWC 1U4s with 40TB in RAID 5 connected. So local storage isn’t a problem.
My current method of working between my MacStudio and my ASUS laptop is to copy the folder with my Scrivener project to OneDrive. On the Windows laptop, copy that folder to the local Documents folder on my laptop’s internal SSD. When I am done working on the Windows machine, the process repeats in the other direction.
You might be interested in methods for streamlining that. I also wrote a bit more on that, in this forum thread. With two systems pointing their automatic backup folders at the same synced location, it’s very easy to switch devices with minimal risk. For swapping .zips, most of the complex problems of smart sync and all that are nullified.
Treat sync like a glorified floppy. It’s what it is best at.
That solves the Scrivener project issue. In my novel folder are other working documents that need to stay synced. Most are not impacted by the issues that affect Scrivener due to the nature of the pkg and the differences between Win and Mac FS. I have an EndNote 21 library (yes, I use EndNote’s sync, but it’s easier to keep the library local and current), Images folder, folders for each character including Word doc, images, Omni Outliner file, and Aeon Timeline - which is also synced to the Scrivener file and adds a level of complexity because the paths are different between the Mac and Windows systems. Both systems share a common backup folder on one of my NAS drives.
