I keep my live files in Dropbox as offline files, as recommended, but my backups live in Google Drive as online-only files to save space (or file streaming as Google calls it). This has worked fine for at least a couple of years, but in the last few days, Scrivener can’t find the backup directory until I re-link to it.
It isn’t a showstopper and I guess it’s something Google has changed in the way Drive works, so I wondered (a) if you’re aware of it and (b) anything I can do about it.
I am using an old MacBook Pro that’s stuck on OS 11.7, so issues like this are becoming more common as it ages long past reasonable hope of support.
I hope those are ZIP backups. Google Drive is known to be unreliable with unzipped Scrivener projects.
https://scrivener.tenderapp.com/help/kb/cloud-syncing/google-drive-advisory
From Scrivener’s point of view, it always saves to a location on the local hard drive. It has no awareness of any cloud service that might be managing that location. The issue lies somewhere between Mac OS and Google Drive.
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Yes, I should have been clear, these are the zipped backups. As I said, my live files are in Dropbox. I’m aware that it’s not a Scrivener issue but I hoped that someone else might also have encountered it and found a solution. Anything to avoid the hell of Google’s own customer service forums.
Since automatic backups of your Scrivener projects are so important (and your ancient macOS), my best advice is to re-point the backup destination to be the the local drive and rely on TimeMachine for backup of those backups.
I recommend putting your backups to ~/backups/scrivener folder.
If you don’t have a routine TimeMachine backup setup, please do set it up. As it’s an old machine it may will crash on you at some point and you don’t want to lose stuff.
Thanks. What I really need is a new computer. 
One reason for using GD is to save local drive space by having my backups in a remote location, and before this I would have considered Google’s servers a more reliable bet than my own network drive (although Time Machine does back up my live .scriv files from the Dropbox folder).
But, is not Google Drive a sync service, so aren’t necessarily saving local disk space? And if the local backup copy gets deleted (accidentally or deliberate) or corrupted, then the copy on Google instantly gets deleted or corrupted. Hence I do not rely on sync services for backup. Just me, but it is what I advocate.
If you want/need remote backups, there are ways to do that more securely than sync services.
It’s a sync service, but like Dropbox you can choose to mirror or to stream files on demand. The latter is fine for zipped backups and saves on local storage. Provided I’m saving several backups this will have to be sufficient, alongside the iterative snapshots in Scrivener for my live files.
Of course, there are belts and braces solutions using dedicated backup services but I have to find a balance between my needs and my resources. Google Drive has a lot of other applications and I’ve got files going back 10+ years.
Yea. I get that. But do not lose sight of your original issue and problem. Even if you set the backups to a local drive which is unlikely to lose the setup, you can copy all those backup files from the local folder to Google manually or setup something automated.