I’m totally new to Scrivener and just spent a week breaking up my imported document into parts, chapters and scenes. Now I want to start experimenting with the structure and play with moving stuff around. BUT that’s all it is at this point - experimenting. I don’t want to completely rearrange everything then decide I liked it better the first way and not be able to get back to what I had previously.
Is there a way I can make a back-up/ copy of my current structure (basically the whole contents of the binder, as well as the associated text)?? I thought maybe I could copy it as a separate project or something (titled “Original”), but I can’t work out how I would do this.
I have a back-up of the manuscript as it was pre-import, but I want a copy of it in its current Scrivener format if that’s possible.
File > Back Up > Back Up To… will let you create a copy of the entire project, date-stamped and zipped in an archive if you wish. This is the best way to create “milestone” backups of your project, or to make backups to an external drive and so on. Scrivener also automatically creates a backup when you close the project, saving the five most recent, but since these roll off as new ones are created and they are all saved to a set location and with a given title, they’re not intended for this sort of permanent backup copy but rather emergency backups if something goes awry and you need to restore from a session or two ago. (While you’re looking into backups, though, I do recommend checking out the Backup tab of Tools > Options and setting these preferences to suit you; you can read more on backing up your work in section 7.8 of the user manual, available from the Help menu.)
Depending how you’re playing with arrangements, something else you may want to consider–in addition to the backup–is using a collection to try different orderings. A collection is essentially a flat list of alies to your binder items, and you can move the items around in the collection to try different arrangements without affecting their order in the binder. If you find you like it, you can regroup them accordingly in the binder. You can read up on collections in the manual also, but to try it, Shift- or Ctrl-click in the binder to select the items you want to place in the collection, then choose Documents > Add to Collection > New Collection. The collection tabs will open at the top of the binder, with the new collection loaded and ready for you to rename. The items will all appear just in a list–there aren’t any hierarchies in collection, so this is just about considering the linear arrangement of your documents–and you can drag them around in the list just as you can in the binder. To return to the regular binder, either click the “Binder” tab at the top in the list of tabs or click the circled “x” in the binder footer. You can toggle the visibility of the collection tabs via the Collections icon button in the main toolbar (by default, the second from the left, just to the right of the Binder icon that toggles the visibility of the entire binder sidebar) or View > Collections > Show Collections.
Thank you so much, this is very helpful.