I’ve learned the hard way that once a document is bookmarked, I cannot move that document. Is there a way to do that so that the link to the document holds? I’ve partially solved the problem by putting documents I’ve bookmarked in a folder on my MacBook Air desktop and labelled this folder DO NOT MOVE.
However, I now see I’ve in fact created another problem: what if my computer crashes? What if this oldish computer finally quits and I need to buy a new one? I have a sickening feeling that 100s (yes, at least) of bookmarked articles will end up with that dreaded “?” sign: i.e. can’t be found by Scrivener.
Is there a way of moving this folder and maintaining the links?
There isn’t a way to track file moves/renames for those files kept outside of a Scrivener project.
As for crashes; get an external USB drive that’s double (or more) what your internal storage is on your Mac. Plug it in, go to your Mac’s Settings app, then to Time Machine, and select that disk as your Time Machine backup drive. Keep plugging that drive in to update your backups daily (or at least weekly). In the event of your Mac being replaced, you’ll have the backup drive to retrieve all of your data.
I just tried to add a project bookmark to the document I was working on and all my new document’s text disappeared and Scrivener crashed. I had to reboot my computer and when I opened up Scrivener again, the last half page of my document was missing. This has never happened before. Is this a compatibility issue? I just updated my Mac to Catalina 10.15.6. Thanks for your thoughts.
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There isn’t a way to track file moves/renames for those files kept outside of a Scrivener project.
Thank you. I guess I’m stuck with this file of over 50 documents on my desktop.
I back up a lot. My concern is if I had to use another computer, all the bookmarks to documents on my old computer desktop would no longer link. I can’t see how to move this fat file of over 50 documents off the desktop (and into, say, dropbox or even into Scrivener) and have the links hold. Short of relinking them all, one by one. (Groan!) I think I’m just going to have to do it.
The most robust way to move a project and its linked files would be to have them all in the same branch of your directory tree. For instance, you could have /Documents/MyBigProject/Images and /Documents/MyBigProject/Text/BigProject.scriv. If you move the entire MyBigProject folder as one unit, the items will continue to have the same relative paths.
Test this solution first, though. As soon as you step outside the Scrivener project, you’ll be affected by how Apple handles the reference to the file.
Thank you for this suggestion, Katherine! I will test it carefully, but it seems to me I might move my Scrivener file to my desktop as a first step, and then move the file of bookmarked articles and the Scrivener file together into a Dropbox file.
Then I tried creating an alias of the bookmarked documents file and moving the alias into the Scrivener Projects file in Dropbox. The links held, but only so long as I kept the big file of bookmarked articles on my desktop, so back to square one.
No way around it: I’m going to have to begin moving the articles into Scrivener or a Dropbox file and re-bookmarking them one-by-one.
In the future, first putting documents in a file on Dropbox and then bookmarking them will be the way to go.
A caution from Scrivener about not moving bookmarked documents would help us newbies! (Or maybe this already exists?)
I hope I’m not misleading anyone with my previous post… are you saying that bookmarks to external files and files imported as aliases use relative paths if the Scrivener project shares part of the full path to the external files? I thought in both cases, the bookmarks or aliases were stored using the full path.
Katherine
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I hope I’m not misleading anyone with my previous post… are you saying that bookmarks to external files and files imported as aliases use relative paths if the Scrivener project shares part of the full path to the external files? I thought in both cases, the bookmarks or aliases were stored using the full path.
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Could you explain the difference between a relative path and a full path? Thanks!
A full path starts at the “root” of your hard drive (Macintosh HD in the finder), and includes every folder between that root (/) and the final folder (Users/sgulland/Documents/myproject), whereas a relative path assumes you’re starting from one folder that has a common base (/Users/sgulland/Documents, for instance), and so only explicitly names folders starting from that perspective (so only referencing myproject and research, rather than all the folders up through “Documents”).
These concepts are most useful in programming and when working in the Terminal, where one may want to look at the contents of /Users/sgulland/Documents/myproject and then go down one folder to Documents, and then into the research folder without typing out /Users/sgulland/Documents/ to get there. Without a programmer’s background (or without having interacted with computers since before Windows was invented), all this may seem very esoteric, especially in the age of iOS, where they threw out the whole concept of folders, except as a metaphor.
Aliases and bookmarks are not the same thing, though they serve similar purposes. “Import Research Files as Aliases” creates a pointer to a location in the file system. On the Mac, that pointer should continue to work if the file is moved on the same system, but not if it is moved across systems. It’s a system-generated record and is not user-editable.
A bookmark, on the other hand, is just a text description of a location. It could be a web location (http://) or it could be a location in the local file system (file:///). It can be edited to use any path name you want. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I appear to have been mistaken, in that you do need a full path, not a relative path.
