Append date AND TIME to saved project name?

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

Is there a way to do this automatically? I see that backups can be saved with date appended to name, but this doesn’t seem to apply to regular saves and doesn’t seem to append time with date. Am I missing something?

Thanks, Randall Lee Reetz

2

Your regular save is a save-in-place to the currently opened project, and is simply updating the various components of the project that have been modified since the last time it saved. By default, Scrivener will save all the various components back to disk when you take a 2-second break from typing (this interval is configurable). Since this is a save-in-place, changing the project name doesn’t make sense.

A backup is where Scrivener will write out an entirely new copy of the project to a configured location. To keep from overwriting previous backups, it changes the name of the project. It is not meant to be in the same location as your regular project, and Scrivener has options to help control how many old backups you have, whether the backups are saved as archived ZIP files or not, and whether to put the timestamp in the filename.

You can also manually perform a Save As. Like a backup, this will create a new copy of your project. UNLIKE a Backup:

  1. You pick the target location at the time of the Save As.
  2. You pick the name of the new project at the time of the Save As. The name you pick is up to you, so you can add a date/time into the project name. HOWEVER…
  3. Since this is meant to be a workable copy of your project, Scrivener switches to using this new copy as your open copy of the project. So now as you keep working forward, you are now modifying (and saving) to this newly created version, so the timestamp would indicate when you forked this copy, not *when it was last saved/maintained.
3

You can get the desired result from File->Back Up->Back Up To…
Select the options to add date & time to the file name, and to ZIP compress it (so you can’t accidentally edit your new backup copy), plus you can specify where this copy gets saved. It’s separate from your automatic backups, which probably are set to be created when you close the project, unless you changed those settings.

Back Up To… is much better than Save As, since it doesn’t switch you over to that new copy, so there’s less of a chance that you’ll edit the copy and the return to the original to find your recent work “has gone missing”.

4

Oh, neat! I somehow missed that existed.