Hi all
I current back up to dropbox every time I save my project but it’s the free version so every time I save, it’s basically full. I really don’t want to pay £7.99 a month for 2TB as I don’t need anywhere near bthat much.
I’ve found idrive, which is half the price (for the 1st year) for 5TB! What do others use and can you link it to scrivener to automatically back up on save
Thanks
As you’re talking about backups, if you have them zipped, almost any cloud service will do, iCloud Drive (which I use, though I pay the GBP 0.79/month for 50GB), Box, OneDrive, Google Drive and many others. They may be OK with unzipped backups but I prefer the safety of single zipped files; remember a live Scrivener project is potentially thousands of files presented in the finder as a single package.
Mark
Thanks. I didn’t realise that there was a 79p 50gb option with icloud, that sounds like it might suit.
I tried compressing the file but my 120k word project took aaaaaaaages to save!
Remember there is a big difference from using Dropbox as your “save” folder to facilitate synching with other devices, and storing zipped or other “snapshots” of your projects. “Saving to Dropbox” is NOT a backup as any change replicates everywhere.
Use Scrivener’s backup feature and put the backup somewhere safe. I save to ~/Backups/Scrivener/ and then also backup that folder with TimeMachine and other backups methods.
I don’t sync with any other devices so I just need somewhere secure for my projects in case something disastrous happens to my hard drive.
Ok. but how do those files get there? By saving in Scrivener? Or via Scrivener’s backup? if the former, they aren’t backups.
Where the backups reside is a secondary issue.
I’m not sure what you’re asking. I work on the files on my hard drive. Every time I save, a copy is saved to dropbox (via the backup settings in preferences (/users/*******/Dropbox).
OK. That sounds better as I presume you have checked “on” in Menu: Preferences → Preferences “backup with each manual save”. And this backup folder different from where you keep your Scrivenr Project “packages”.
To me that’s a bit over-kill in consuming your backup space on Dropbox. If your problem is using up your “free” Dropbox space then this might be the first place to reconsider your settings. Also look at how many backup copies you keep, and if compressed or not. All up to you.
For me, I only “Backup on Project Open” to save the project before I make changes. If really concerned, guess one can “Backup on Project Close”, but I don’t do it since I have a TimeMachine/et.al. backup of the Project folder holding the Scrivener “package” anyway.
It’s the simplest solution as I’m not technically gifted and I’m rather paranoid about losing files.
You probably have this already. but if not, setup a TimeMachine backup of your entire Mac. Very important, IMHO.
Yes, have always had TM set up
Here to re-iterate this. Many cloud services are not compatible with Scrivener projects files in an unzipped format. For example, we highly discourage keeping unzipped files in Google Drive. If you put unzipped files in a cloud service, you risk them not downloading correctly when you need them. So, even if the zip backups take a while, I would recommend backing up less frequently (or splitting the project to reduce file size) over not zipping your backups. They’re just a lot more secure and foolproof. Using zipped backups also gives you the freedom to choose whichever cloud service you prefer and fits your budget.