I use Scrivener on my iMac, but I just bought an iPad do I can use Scrivener on the go.
Now this means I need to move my projects to Dropbox. Thing is, I have all my back ups in Dropbox. Is this a bad idea or should I change the back ups to iCloud? Do back ups work the same way with iOS as they do on the iMac?
Forgive what are probably daft questions but I’m not the most techie person.
Many people will advise against putting your live work and your Scrivener backups in the same basket. What happens if that basket gets wiped out, or your account gets locked for some reason?
When transitioning from your Mac to your iPad, you also have to wait for both backup and your main project to finish syncing up to Dropbox before you can bring that synced data down to your iPad, since it’s hard to tell what order it all happens in.
If you have space on another sync service (like iCloud Drive), I’d relocate your backups there. Zip-compressed backups are perfectly safe on any cloud service. It’s the project files you’re actively working with that you have to be careful with.
Scrivener for iOS does not do automatic backups. If you want to back up from that app, you have to do so manually. I believe that’s covered in the tutorial built into the app, but if not, search for how to do iOS scrivener backups on google. It’s not hard, but you have to remember to do it.
Good question, Marc64.
When you’re syncing between your iMac and your iPad, your Scrivener projects will be in their own folder on Dropbox. That folder will be created as Apps/Scrivener when you’re setting up Dropbox syncing on your iPad, and that process is provided step by step on this Knowledge Base article.
Your backups folder is likely its own, separate folder on Dropbox. Perhaps named “Scrivener Backups” or something similar I presume. Is that correct?
If so, having each in its own sub-folder on Dropbox should be secure.
But, redirecting your iMac’s backups to iCloud would give you some redundancy in case Dropbox has issues, so it’s not a bad plan. (I also advise using Apple’s Time Machine on the iMac, for additional security.)
And, you’ll want to add manual backups for the iPad via the methods on this manual iOS backups article.
Thanks for the very helpful replies.
Ruth, I’ll have a look at those articles, thanks.
iPad & Magic Keyboard arrived yesterday. All done and dusted with no dramas, an extremely rare occurrence for me.
Just one moment of confusion before realising that the default path on Dropbox is Apps/Scrivener whereas my projects are stored in a Scrivener folder (no Apps). Is there any reason why Apps/Scrivener is recommended?
There might be a reason, but I am sure it does not matter. As long as you know where they are, and if you want to sync with Dropbox they have to be in a folder under Dropbox.
All the files in the folder you sync iOS Scrivener with will be downloaded to your iOS device, even if they’re not part of any Scrivener projects. It’s a huge waste of your iOS’s storage capacity at best, or completely fill it up at worst. It can also slow down syncs.
Note that you won’t see anything in your projects list except for the Scrivenerr projects, but all the other files and folders will still have been downloaded.