Hello! I searched through the topics and couldn’t find the info I was looking for, so forgive this newbie if I’ve completely missed it.
Anyway, I’m wondering about Binder size, vis-à-vis how much data I can pile in one project.
As a Stephen King fan, I’ve modeled numerous stories and novels to take place in the same universe, with numerous subtle character crossovers and references to many of the same events, places, et cetera. It would be very convenient for me if I could put all my stuff in one Binder, but I worry about the program slowing down / crashing if I put too much data in there.
One project I have is >1 million words, and that project works without issue, but I have five more projects ranging from 55k to 83k words each, plus ~100k words of short stories. Considering I’d be merging the Character Sheet databases resulting in hundreds of characters, do you think I’d be reaching a threshold of functionality?
I could spend time experimenting by creating a new project and copying everything in there, but I figured I’d ask some other users first.
The limits are really going to be set by your hardware. A fully loaded current-generation Mac Pro should be able to easily handle projects that would choke an older MacBook.
It also depends on what you’re trying to do. If you try to view that entire million-word project in a single Scrivenings session, you’re much more likely to run into problems than you would be while editing a single character sheet.
And it depends on what’s in the project. A handful of high resolution images will pose more of a performance issue than many thousands of words of text.
As a practical matter, I would be most concerned about backup and synchronization tasks. You can avoid large Scrivenings sessions. You can wait out a lengthy Compile step. But if you’re storing a project in Dropbox, you need to make sure that Dropbox has finished synchronizing before you shut your computer down Every. Single. Time. The bigger the project, the longer that will take, and the more likely you are to inadvertently interrupt the process.