I use the ‘Research’ section of each Scrivener project extensively before I ever put anything in the ‘Draft’ section. My computer recently crashed, and when I found my Scrivener file on Time Machine, only the ‘Draft’ section, not the ‘Research’ section, of my Scrivener document was in the back up. How do I tell Time Machine to back up the ‘Research’ portion of the project, too (or where do I find it, if it is already there)?
The backup scrivener creates on my computer had both sections backed up, but my computer crashed before it had backed up for the day, and none of my saved work for the day was in the backup. I am looking for an automatic system to take care of this, if possible, as I am abysmal at backing up when I am really on cranking along with my work.
Thank you!
Technical details:
Scrivener version 2.3.1
MacBook Pro: OSX 10.5.8
Time Machine should back up the entire project. It can’t tell the difference between the “Draft” and “Research” areas, it’s all just files at the system level.
How are you restoring from Time Machine? Are you using the Time Machine interface, or digging through the backup drive manually?
When I open a project in Scrivener, the Scrivener binder (at the left) has two main sections: Draft, and Research (and Trash at the bottom). I usually have multiple ‘files’ in both the Draft and the Research by the time I’m done.
I used the Time Machine interface to view the document to decide whether or not to restore. No information I had in ‘Research’ appeared in the time machine backup (although the Scrivener autosave had been working, and the time machine had also been working), but the information I had in the Draft part of the binder was there.
Having the ‘draft’ and ‘research’ sections of the binder is really, really useful to me, and I’m hoping there is a solution.
Did you actually restore the project, or did you just look at the “snapshot” that Time Machine shows you?
I just checked with one of my own projects. “Research” files do not appear in the Time Machine snapshot, but are present in the restored project. I’m not sure why that would be – possibly something to do with how Time Machine handles Scrivener’s project format – but that means the only way to know for sure whether a file is there is to restore the backup and open it in Scrivener.