I was doing some housekeeping the other day when I noticed the trove of backups for a previous novel of mine ran to a significant amount of storage. Looking closer, I saw that each backup was significant – too large for a mere 80k words of text. I presume that with each backup Scrivener is zipping the entire project including any reference material. I had added other full-length manuscripts, images, PDFs for reference in the Scrivener project. Each backup zips all of these every time. The result is a lot of wasted storage.
In future I have learned not to do this. As for those older zip archives, I’d like to keep them, but without the superfluous reference material. Is there a way to achieve this without manually going through each zip archive?
I can’t think of a way to automatically–you are asking for how not to do it manually–extract parts of the zip file. Others may think of something else.
You’ll likely have to restore each into a new (and separate) Scrivener file, then do a new backup storing to a new zip file, or something.
Or … (you did not indicate if you are Windows or macOS user):
I did a Google search for “delete parts of zip file” and I see a number of hits.
WinZip which runs on Windows appears to offer that, according to search results.
the macOS “zip” app (available as a command inside the “terminal” app) appears to have delete capability, per the “man” file. If there is a pattern to the folder/file names, then may be opportunity to write and use a command file to roll through all the files.
I have not used either of the above in this way, nor did I test these ideas. “Your mileage may vary”. If you do this, you’ll probably want to check if the new zip file can be unzipped into a un-corrupted Scrivener project.
As these are all backups intended for restoring a specific older version, are these old backups that important to go to this effort? Perhaps offload to another disk/server/storage device (if available).
As these are all backups intended for restoring a specific older version, are these old backups that important to go to this effort? Perhaps offload to another disk/server/storage device (if available).
That’s definitely the route I would take. Ideally all of these backups, as well as the ones Scrivener deleted in the past as part of its normal rotation in handling backups, would already be stored somewhere else anyway. If not, now’s a good time to start!
Going forward, you might consider using the File ▸ Import ▸ Research Files as Aliases... menu command (on Windows it will be “Shortcuts”), instead of the normal approach of fully copying and storing the resources inside the project. You will need to manage your files a little more carefully, so that the links don’t break, but this approach has all of the benefits of fully imported items, without the bloat.
Another command is File ▸ Insert Image Linked to File..., instead of dropping the image directly into the text editor. You can even combine this approach with the above, in that the images are imported as aliases, and then you use the “Image Linked to Document” command to insert it into the editor. That way you use the more robust Alias technology for tracking the file location, and meanwhile the image link in the text uses internal ID referencing instead of paths and file names.
Depending on your settings you could have 3, 5, 10, 25 backups. For dormant projects I would suggest, opening the project and make sure everything is there and then back it up. Now take the zip backup and place on a cloud folder, or external drive, or Usb key. If the backup works then delete as many of the extra backups as you are comfortable with to decrease storage. If you are not using the backups will be there in the usual place, but leave only a few. Delete the project and further reduce your drive footprint.
Don’t bother stripping out research. If still takes up too much space get a small drive and backup all dormant backups there. I have 40 + different projects including 4 novels with research, projects on Scrivener itself, software for writing, books on writing I have read and several projects just on writing tips and info gathered over the years all with max backups of 25 and all that is around 28 gigs. So a small external drive or 32 gig USB key or higher should handle your stuff. Check the size of the folder holding your backups to be sure.
Thanks to everyone who contributed suggestions. I’ve decided to tar and gzip the whole archive and offload it to external storage where I don’t have to see them or worry about it. Out of sight, out of mind.