I’ve used Scrivener for Windows for some months now. Wanting to own a Mac, doing pilgrimages to the local Mac-store to drool over the computers. I seriously thought they’d kick me out of the store soon for all the Mac-hugging I did… They probably thought I’d chain myself to one of them 'puters soon.
And today… My new Mac is here! Yippity! And the first program I am going to buy? Scrivener for Mac. Now I finally have full access to all those wonderful features. It really is Christmas in August!
Now I wonder how to transfer my Scrivener Windows info to my Scrivener Mac version… Maybe I need to use Dropbox or something like that. Any advice?
I’d suggest just copying all of your “Documents” folder contents (assuming that’s where your Scrivener projects are) to a thumb drive. In fact, while you’re out shopping, pick up a nice USB3 (or thunderbolt, if you like) external hard drive that’s bigger than your computer’s built-in hard drive. Plug it into your old windows computer, and copy all of your documents, music files, etc… over to it. Then eject it and plug it into your mac, and drag the information to the appropriate folders there.
Once you’re done, use Disk Utility to “erase” it as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) drive, then pop over to the System Preferences application (under Applications/Utilities) and click on the Time Machine icon in the “System” section. Tell it that the new drive is your Time Machine backup drive, and let it do it’s thing overnight.
When the inevitable accidental deletion or worse disaster occurs, you’ll thank me.
Happy shopper returns… Thank you for the advice Will do. And I can use the external drive as the TimeMachine backup purposes from then on? Was planning on doing that, but wasn’t sure if a normal external drive - Freecom Mobile Drive - will do or do I need ot buy some Mac-specific gadget).
Any external drive that can be plugged into your Mac will do. Check that it can read the drive before bothering to copy your data to it from the windows computer; it’s the fastest way to do the data copy. Macs can read and write to some of the formats that Windows uses, but not all. If that fails, then you might be able to share your windows documents folder on your wifi network and copy to your Mac from that. There are various of ways to accomplish the task, in other words; pick whichever one works with the least effort or inconvenience.
For the Time Machine backup, you’ll have to erase it using the Mac’s Disk Utility as I described, so that it can take advantage of the Mac’s special file system features, but yes you’ll then be able to use it as your automated backup solution, so long as the drive is plugged into your computer.
Me too, me too. Today it arrived, my new mba 13 with 8gb ram and 256gb ssd. Yeah. Never was getting to work so fast and easy. Within a few minutes the mba was ready to go and scrivener installed. Dropbox needed some download time though
@robertdguthrie: Thanks for your information. How much bigger does the time machine hd has to be? How long do the incremental backups need in average? Is a usb 2.0 hd ok? Can I use my tm hd for other stuff or is it completely in use by apples tm?
As big as you can afford. I’d suggest 500Gb as a minimum, just because that’s the smallest you’re likely to find unless you try to get a solid state drive for backups (not a bad idea, but probably way too expensive). I’d shoot for 50GB+ bigger than your internal drive as the ABSOLUTE bare minimum, but 2x is far better.
Once the initial backup is done, a USB2 drive can probably do a backup in abot 1 to 3 minutes. It all depends on how many files changed, how big they are, or how many other files sit alongside them (it has to scan each directory where changes occurred to find the updated/new files).
Perfectly acceptable. At some point you might want to upgrade to USB3. I’d wait a few years to see if Thunderbolt is going strong in the rest of the industry, or if it’s going to turn out to be another FireWire before investing in too many TB accessories.
Sure. But I’ve experienced a number of hard drive failures in my day (I’ve been using some form of disk since the mid 80s), so I’ll caution you against doing so. If it’s your only copy, then it’s far too vulnerable to data loss. You can make Time Machine back up external drive too if you change the TM settings while the other drive is hooked up, so consider a separate disk for keeping archives of your data, and make sure your backup disk is big enough to keep data from all your drives, internal and external.
Also, try to keep your TM backup separate from your computer; try your best to reduce the risk that a theft or accident will rob you of all of your data in one fell swoop. Obviously, they both have to be in one place to do backups, but both should only rarely be in the same bag, or be sitting next to the same glass of water.
Great! Many thanks for your fast reply. I’ll then use my 500GB usb 2.0 instead of my 1TB usb 3.0 so I can use it for other backup files on my pc and nas.
This is so much fun, really. I used my mba extensively since 4pm with installs, heavy downloads etc and still got 7 hours left to go without it ever being charged from me before.
Your TM drive be min 2x the capacity of the drives you will be backing up.
Your TM drive be a dual drive array in raid1 (mirror) mode.
if you have a nas create a dedicated lun in a raid1 space and use it for TM. My experience is that externals has left me jaded to using them as backup drives unless you are using multiple drives and rotating them and replacing them frequently.
1-3: I agree that those are the best parameters. Alternately, you can use two different TM backup drives, swapping them frequently.
As for NAS; I’ve lost 4 entire backup volumes because of corruption to apple’s sparsebundles (virtual drives that Mac OS creates when backing up over a network). I was able to rescue a backup from a failing external drive that was formatted for Mac OS, and have never had trouble with any other directly connected drive when it comes to data corruption. I no longer trust sparsebundles as my only backup solution, RAID or no, so NAS is at best a secondary solution, in my opinion.
I’ll use the tm drive for a quick system backup for just in case and the nas (1 bay only) as backup medium for all the documents and photos/pictures. Another 1TB usb3 will serve as nas backup. + Dropbox for documents.
For example, I have a Time Machine disk at home and in my office. Despite the advice given above, I partitioned the disk at home into two drives: a time machine disk and a media disk. I also store other material on the work disk. I do this, however, in the full knowledge that if the disk fails I will lose that data if it is not also stored elsewhere.
I usually take Jaysen’s advice - but I too have partitioned my two 1 Tb external drives (which I swap out to an external location). I use the two non-TM partitions for SuperDuper clones (which will make life much easier if my Mac hard disk packs up).
You can boot from the full clone, so you are still immediately back in business even if your machine’s hard drive goes down.
I use something like Hugh’s strategy: two partitions on a drive, one for the TM backup and the other for a Superduper clone backup. The former has the value of being cumulative (to the storage limit of the volume); the latter is not cumulative, but has the virtue of bootability.
Well, Time Machine won’t work as a boot disk, but Mountain Lion does have the tools built-in to create an invisible boot partition “rescue disk” on any drive (internal or external). I have one of my TM disks partitioned in this way (and, thanks to your prompt, will do the same for the other asap as I overlooked this step when I set it up). No 3rd party apps required. The benefit of this is that the rescue partition will install a few key disk utilities that you can use to troubleshoot your hard drive and run some basic repairs. It’s worth doing this even if you also use SuperDuper.
While I think SuperDuper is a great app, I prefer the benefits of a clean install and so would rather use Mountain Lion’s system. The downside of Apple’s approach is that, unless you have saved the Mountain Lion installer to your TM disk, it will download everything it needs to reinstall. If time is of the essence, SuperDuper is probably faster.
Having said that, I replaced my internal hard disk a few weeks ago and it only took a couple of hours to reinstall Mountain Lion from scratch (using the rescue partition) and then to restore my User account. The new disk was encrypted overnight and the next day it was as if nothing happened (except my machine is so responsive now! No more spinning beach ball of doom while waiting for… everything and I was finally able to install SPSS for Mac without issue).
