Amber,
Thank you so much for your help and sage advice. I’ve been following your links and learned a fair lot. In particular, I’ve managed not to realize that “import this Scrivener doc over there” does a merge if the two documents have common origin, the very thing I was looking for. (On the Mac.)
One problem I’m going to have is that my workflow goes back-and-forth a lot between my Mac and my iPad. Some of the cool functionality isn’t available on iPad, and that seems to include the magic merge technology. At least I can’t find the iPad equivalent to File>Import>Project. I’m also not sure if the iPad version can make automatic backups.
When I talk about iCloud Drive, I was thinking “substitute iCloud Drive for Dropbox in the automatic workflow.” Right now, it looks like Scrivener has a special arrangement for Dropbox (where the documents reside in an area of the synced Dropbox folder and are magically detected/synced even if they are open) that can’t be used with any other synced-disk facility. The help files about “using sync services” are all talking about Mac/Windows syncing; the iOS section just talks about the magic Dropbox integration. Am I missing something here?
I hear you about the trade-off between convenience and safety, though. I need to figure out where my personal balance lies on that. I have a lot of “let me just scribble some thoughts into that doc while I have them” moments, so quick access matters to me.
Again, thank you for all the kind words and the useful pieces of advice.
Cheers
– perry