I see there is an ongoing discussion about backing up/syncing with Dropbox, but I couldn’t find much about Backblaze on the forum, hence this thread.
Does anyone use Backblaze to backup their work on Scrivener?
Having owned Scrivener for a few hours, I already love the writing process and I’m already frustrated by Backblaze’s apparent inability to recognize my Scrivener document and put it on the cloud.
I’m not sure what is causing the problem, since “scriv.” files do not appear in Backblaze’s list of exclusions. (If I “scriv” files every go under another name, I may be overlooking something here).
So far I am unsuccessful in my attempt to troubleshoot by using Scrivener’s in-house backup procedure to create a zip file. On Backblaze, this file appears as a “scrivx” file, which then fails to open. I get the following message:
“Dissertation+ (4).scrivx” is the main structure file for a project, but other required files for this project could not be found: the /Files/Data and /Settings folders are missing."
If anyone has advice on how to proceed, I would be very grateful. Thanks!
Before we dig into this much further, remember that a Scrivener project is really a folder, with subfolders and potentially hundreds of component files. Backblaze will show you that entire structure, and you want to be sure that you restore the entire .scriv folder.
Also, Backblaze is backup software, while Dropbox is synchronization software. They have different goals, and work slightly differently. In particular, Backblaze isn’t really designed for sharing live projects between systems, while Dropbox is.
With those caveats in mind, though, Backblaze handles Scrivener files – both backing up and restoring – with no particular problems for me.
On the upload side, it “just works:” I’ve configured my entire Documents folder to upload to the Backblaze server, and all of my Scrivener projects appear in the Backblaze interface as I would expect.
On the restore side, Backblaze will pack whatever you want to restore into a ZIP file. Again, make sure that you’re restoring the .scriv folder and all of its contents. Once Backblaze generates the ZIP file, download it, unpack it, and look down through the directory tree. You should find the project waiting there, ready to go.
If either of those things is not happening, you might want to contact Backblaze support as well.
A Scrivener file is now appearing in Backblaze–there seems to have been a slight lag, one that I’m not familiar with in the case of Word files. I can restore the file without the error message appearing.
Strangely, though, the error comes up again when I try to restore with the (theoretically faster) “Backblaze Downloader.”
Without this tool, it takes at least five minutes to download–and the size of this Scrivener file is small at the moment in relation to what it might become!
In any case, at least now there is a path to restoring the file. That said, I’d be grateful for any advice on the “Backblaze Downloader” issue.
Because of the relatively complicated structure of Scrivener projects, it’s not surprising that there’s a little bit of lag the first time the project is backed up. For future backups, though, Backblaze should only need to upload the changed files and should go pretty quickly.
What is the “Backblaze downloader” you’re referring to? For my test, I just downloaded via the Backblaze website. Have you contacted Backblaze support?
Ahm… just to repeat what Katherine wrote above: a Scrivener project is NOT a file, although it looks like that. It’s a package, i.e. a folder hiding its inner content. A Word file is file…
A further comment on lag, download time, and so on.
Remember that Backblaze is not a synchronization tool. It is not designed to allow you to transfer your work between systems in real time. It’s designed to quietly chug away in the background to keep your data safe, and to pack up your work and send it to you when you need to restore it. This means, among other things, that it tries to minimize both the computer CPU time and the internet bandwidth that it uses, potentially at the expense of performance.
Thanks to both of you for walking me through this.
I stand corrected on the terminology…
Happy to report that the “Backblaze downloader” (which I’ll describe below) has now successfully retrieved the Scrivener project. I am not sure what the problem was.
To clarify, I am also downloading from the Backblaze website. After initiating restore of the Scrivener project, I can monitor its progress under the “My Restores” tab. Here Backblaze also invites me to use the “Backblaze downloader” app, noting that it will speed up the download (which is taking quite a while). It cuts the download time to a few seconds.