Pretty much everything you’ve heard is a myth, basically. So here’s the short and simple:
- No, Dropbox is not “safer” or more “reliable” than other services.
- We do not recommend it over other services.
- We certainly do not only support it, or strongly advise that’s all you use (you will see people saying stuff like that). Nothing anywhere in our documentation or website states that, or even subtler statements. I think the closest we may come to it is a line like, “Many sync services, like Dropbox, are safe to use with Scrivener…”, which obviously states the opposite anyway.
- iCloud Drive works fine, contrary to what you’ll read elsewhere (people saying it’s “not supported”). It doesn’t work fine on Windows because Apple.
- OneDrive works fine, but not on macOS, because Microsoft.
- Packages do not exist. It is a fiction that your Mac presents to you while using the front end, like Finder, or in file open dialogue boxes. There is nothing in the data that makes it something special, mysterious, fragile, or in need of special handling.
With the exception of Google Drive being a little weird sometimes (to the extent we don’t recommend it), there is no wide-spread “incompatibility” with cloud sync. As a concept this is not something that makes technological sense, because in fact there is nothing about a folder acting like a file on your personal computer that changes the fact that it’s merely a folder with files in it, everywhere else (even on your own computer, in contexts that don’t involve the front-end GUI). That very same project, when loaded on Windows, doesn’t look anything like what you see, and it works just like any other folder with files in it—and that’s what a cloud sync service sees too.
Everything that can sync folders and files should sync Scrivener projects. Anything that doesn’t do that properly is not worth using in general, as it should be suspect for any level of file management across the board.
So with that established, you can see how a lot of these myths don’t make any sense. I’ve used this example elsewhere, but some of them are as silly as saying you can only use Seagate hard drives to copy Scrivener projects safely, or that Sandisk drives are “not supported”, or that L&L strongly recommends only using LaCie. If you know how hard drives work, and how file systems work, none of that makes any sense. File sync, as a technology, is a lot more complicated than hard drives, there are many more moving parts of course, but they all essentially work the same as disks do when you copy data around.
Important caveat: a lot of mainstream services have “smart sync” of some sort, and nobody should be using that, period. It’s especially a bad idea to use it with anything that needs more than one file to get a job done, but it’s a terrible setting overall (everyone that uses it has compromised local backups as they don’t actually have ownership of all their data). Dropbox is just as guilty of this, these days, and evidence of that can be seen regularly, with the “help my whole project is blank” reports.
So again: there is no such thing as a “.scriv format”, when it comes to how file servers, networking, hard drives, or file syncing works. It’s just not a thing. There is zero difference between a folder that has “.scriv” typed onto the end of it, and one that does not.
If you want to make sure though, here is a checklist to help you evaluate a service.
Beyond the dirt basic fundamentals above, there is a lot of nuance, and a lot of ground for debating which services are subjectively best. There are issues like how iCloud Drive tells you nothing about whether it is working or not unless you are staring at the icon of the thing in Finder that is being uploaded. There are issues with how Dropbox’s default setting keeps your projects offline. Some might prefer a client, while others prefer it fully embedded in the file manager. There are lots of little things we could debate over, and some even might be more relevant to Scrivener users than others, but the important thing is that almost all of them are fine to use for what they do.
As for an alternative? I use Tresorit. The prices are reasonable, and I like how it lets me sync whatever I want, rather than having to use this mammoth dumping ground centralised folder concept that many use. It works fine with Scrivener, naturally. It syncs folders and files after all. 