I always like to play with new toys and I am beginning a new project.
As such, I do not like the idea of having to work my way through Scrivener 1 and then in a couple months move to the new version.
Is the beta currently in a stage that is definitely able to be worked on? I do not mean flawless, just that I can start my project and slowly flesh it out within the new environment. Certainly won’t have to deal with every detail nor publish it for a long time anyway.
If it’s not quite there yet, I might just wait a couple months.
The guidance that has been given is don’t use it yet on projects that are important.
If you already have Scrivener 1.x and have been using it, go ahead and start on that. Once 3.x stabilizes, you can decide then whether you’re at a point to upgrade or not. Remember, you don’t have to cut everything over at once – you can cut on a per-project basis.
I haven’t had any issues with losing work, with the added caveat that I haven’t had much time to work with the national Football and Gluttony Day. That having been said, I think if I were going to be working on something that would be absolutely soul-crushing to lose I’d export to odt or rtf every time I close, though. (And be certain that the export was good.)
Things at this point feel a lot further along than they were the first week of the 1.0 beta, but a lot has changed, too, and you never know what might be lurking bug-wise.
I’d wait for at least 3 beta releases before beginning to trust the stability of S3 for Windows. Monitor the forums closely for any indication of lost data, whether that data is in the main text of binder entries, or any of the meta-data.
For reference, when I joined the Mac v3 beta, there was a bug that effectively scrambled keywords, depending on how I created them. It took several exchanges with Keith, and eventually a video of me creating keywords before he figured out what the trigger for the bug was.
That beta was further along than Windows’ v3 beta, from what I can tell, having only created a tutorial project on my work PC. The installation was problematic, I had to kill the S3 process twice before I could finally even get to that stage…
In short: Do not use S3 for any work that matters even a little to you. It looks shiny, I know… but that shine comes from some very sharp edges that need to be smoothed over.
Yeah… I think if I were still regularly doing academic writing on a deadline, I wouldn’t use Scrivener 2.9 for anything deadline-critical. It’s fine for what I do, but I don’t particularly care if things go missing or get corrupted. I’ve also got a fairly robust backup system in place, too, because I’m paranoid after grad school.