I finally gave up on backups and turned them all off. If I have a thousand files and since the last save have only changed two, does the backup have to save 998 files besides the ones that I changed? I don’t understand why backup has to take so long.
I have a 56K Scrivener project with about 50 files that on backup took four minutes. Why? I don’t know what it could be doing that takes so long. Something must be wrong with the thermometer, because at 57%, the backup was immediately finished.
The media that you use for backup could influence backup speed a lot. If you backup on an external memory card, it will be very slow. Backups over the network could be also slow. Backing up on your local computer HDD, will be much faster. It also depends on your backup options(with/without zip archiving).
I’ve found that simply switching to another document, then exiting Scrivener forces a complete project backup - even if I haven’t actually typed anything.
My backups are going onto a local drive (NVMe M.2 SSD) and it takes a good 10-12 seconds, even on that. I know ten seconds is a fair bit faster than your four minute estimate, but it does seem a bit unnecessary when I haven’t actually changed any documents.
@GfK: You have actually changed your current main editor document. This info is saved within the project data and the backup is expected. Have in mind that every Scrivener project has a modification ID, which is updated upon each save. This is also very important data that needs to be saved for mobile syncing, and any project data change might need a backup. Probably implementing further options to fine tune the backup algorithm to each user needs is needed in the future.