First - great program - I’ve just completed a 94,000 word mystery with it and love it! It is a great writing tool and it’s made me much more productive.
I’ve searched the forum and did not see this “wish”. While I understand the whole need to zip before using web-based drives like Dropbox and I’m happy to go through the process, it would be great to have an “auto backup” feature. Perhaps it could be set in Preferences where you decide how often to backup (in minutes or at program quit), select the folder to backup to and select whether you’d like the backup zip’ed or not.
This takes the guess work out of remembering to do it.
The thread you are looking for is here. Note that the terminology used there is version 1.5, which is current stable. At some point in the past, the heavy development work on the 1.5 branch got forked over to 2.0 and 1.5 became a bug fix and minor enhancement release. Automatic back-ups were one of the things transitioned to the next major version. So, it’s coming, but for now you’ll need to rely on habit and Cmd-Shift-S.
OmniFocus does a good job with both syncing and auto backups. I’d love to see similar capabilities in Scrivener.
Yes, I have read the Dropbox thread. Still seems suboptimal and error prone, and obviously a functionality many desire. Once you get used to having your files on whatever computer you’re working on, it’s very hard to go back.
OmniFocus also has a whole team working on it. Synchronisation and cloud support and so on is a whole can of worms. It’s definitely something I want to investigate further, and I would like to provide a better solution, but it won’t be for a while yet. The list for 2.0 is still massive. I’m going to look at this sort of thing - I hope - post-2.0, perhaps a 2.5 sort of thing.
All the best,
Keith
This is great to hear. During my current project, my machine crashed twice, and when I restarted Scrivener, the page I had been working on was suddenly empty. I was able to recover 98% of the text from an xml file within the project folder, so no harm was done, but automatic backups would definitely help to (further) increase my peace of mind.
