Bear in mind, what I’m used to is working with a program called git, and using tagging, so that’s my perspective when it comes to versioning/diffing a project.
I recently wrote a novel for nanorwimo, and thought to snapshot everything to ‘nanowrimo2019’.
I organized it so it was Chapter -> Scene, the idea is I’d like to remove/add/move scenes in the project.
What am I doing wrong because it seems like snapshots generate so much noise if you have a unique snapshot per scene, so looking up the state of a chapter at a point in time… is next to impossible. It also doesn’t track moving scenes around, or removing them. I also can’t figure out what the point of First Draft / Second Draft is. In my head it seems like one would note the state of scenes, mark which draft they were, and then filter out documents based on what draft/version they are when compiling.
I suppose I could make a folder in Research called First Draft, and copy everything there, then make one for Second, and so forth, and manually move what I need to compile in each case, but that seems… onerous.
I think there’s something simple I am missing, because it seems like scrivener is great for nanowrimo, but not for anything beyond that.
There are number of tools for tracking the process of writing (which goes far beyond just nanowrimo) and you can adapt them for your own workflow. Up to a point of course; as you point out, it’s not git, and isn’t meant to be. So there isn’t a canonical ‘you must do it this way’ approach: it’s a toolbox, not a straight jacket.
Having said that… here’s one possible route…
Statuses are often used to track the process of writing each individual scene, in which you’d expect the scenes in your manuscript folder to move individually from e.g. To do > First draft > Second draft > Done. When you look at the Manuscript folder in outline view you can get an overview of the progress of the book. Or you could create a collection showing you the gradually reducing numbers of scenes which are still in First Draft.
As you’re doing this you could take a snapshot of each scene as you complete that stage, so it includes its progress within itself (you can name the snapshots First draft etc.
If you work in discrete drafts (e.g. you end Draft 1 of the whole book before starting Draft 2), then in addition you can save a named copy - either as a project in its own right or as a duplicate in a folder in the binder. Or both. I wouldn’t delete the originals in Manuscript - I want to be able to track the changes through snapshots. The copy is therefore a record of the structure as well as the words,
There isn’t a way of tracking changes to the structure (other than a screen shot / compiled version - eg just compile the chapter and scene headings, then import the compiled outline back into the binder as a document.)
HTH