First, on Windows, you have to deal with the fact that your project is actually a folder containing many other files and folders, since Windows doesn’t have the feature that hides this fact from you the way that MacOS does.
The conflicted copies must have happened because you opened your project before the dropbox app on one mac could download all of the minor changes from the other Mac that occur when you open a project or make small changes. Be sure to always close your projects, let dropbox finish uploading those changes, and then on the next computer, wait for those changes to download before opening Scrivener.
Before you delete anything: Close Scrivener on all of your computers, and let dropbox sync up any last minute changes on each. On one computer (the one you work on the most), open the project and use File->Back Up->Back Up To… to create a backup copy; add something to the name that communicates to you that it was from before you deleted conflicts from it. Close that copy of the project, and don’t open Scrivener again until you’re done cleaning things up.
As for the individual “conflicted” files:
2: The “scrivener project” files (if you could see the extensions, you would see ‘.scrivx’) are an index of all of your binder items, plus the keywords you’ve assigned (if any) status values and assignments, etc… But since the newest conflicted copy is from 2 years ago, and the current one is significantly larger, I would think you could safely delete all of those conflicted files.
3a: the Files folder: The Binder backups and autosave “conflicted” files are all super old too. So I think you can delete them. The “binder” backup files are, I believe, a copy of your .scrivx file, or something similar, that Scriver creates as a safeguard against a corrupted primary file. You’ve already got those, and they’re much more current.
3b: Search indexes. These are plain text versions of most of the text in your documents. It’s much faster to search through plain text than it is to search through rich text, I guess, so there’s a copy of some/all of your words for Scrivener to use when you perform a search. Probably it’s also organized better for more targeted searching of titles and metadata, etc… Again these are very old. I’d delete all of the conflicted copies. Also, you can “rebuild” those search indexes. On the Mac version, go to the Scrivener menu (later) with the project open; hold down the OPT key, and you should see a menu item change/appear that says something like “Rebuild Search Indexes”. That can’t hurt to do once you’re done with your cleanup.
4: Docs folder checksum files. These are files that contain a number or set of numbers. When you give a file to a checksum generating program (built into Scrivener here, but they can exist as their own thing), it generates a long serial number based on the contents of the file. It’s a fair bet that the number will be unique to that file’s contents, and it will change when the file’s contents change and you re-caclulate the checksum. As before, these are very old “conflicted” files, and so are probably not relevant to your current project. Delete them.
5: quicklook thumbnails: These are just images generated for when you are browsing using the Mac’s Finder; you click once on a file and hit the spacebar, and up pops a preview of what’s in the document. You can do this with most document types on a Mac, not just Scrivener. You can delete the conflicted copies without any worries.
- Settings folder .plist files: These files contain your project’s specific configuration; compile settings that aren’t global… if you have the ruler showing in one or both editors… and other stuff like that. Don’t hold me to the specifics, but that’s the general purpose of them. As before, the conflicted copies are 2 years older than the current one. I don’t see any value in replacing the current one with any of those, so I’d delete them.
Too long; didn’t read version: Back up your project first, close it on all of your computers if it’s open anywhere. Then on one computer, you can delete all the “conflicted” files without impacting any of your words. Also, let dropbox sync all of those deletions (shouldn’t take long) before you open the project on each computer.
