Hello all. An Apple specialist viewed my computer remotely (my disc was full) and said the problem was that it was full of scrivener backup files. The limit was 1 TB of storage. We determined that in November of 2023 I had changed my backup location to dropbox.
Right now I hope I’m not destroying anything by moving 3GB of old backup files to Google Drive. I will delete what I have on my Mac computer when the upload is done … questions …
Is it normal to have 3GB of backup files for just a few projects
You can limit the number of backups kept per project in the options.
And, no: moving backups doesn’t “destroy or damage” anything as far as Scrivener is concerned. What could happen during the said move is another story, but it should be fine. Especially if your backups are zipped.
The amount (in number and size) of backups you currently have may depend on many factors. The main one likely being that you haven’t set a limit, and a setting per project open and/or close, times your activity in those projects. (So, nothing abnormal with 3gb. Not very good, depending, but normal, yes.)
If I got you right and your Mac has 1 TB of storage and all your Scrivener backups summon up to 3 GB, then the Apple Specialist does either suffer from dyscalculia or was just super lazy.
1 GB (Gigabyte) is 1 000 000 000 B (Byte) = 10^9 B. 1 TB (Terabyte) is 1 000 000 000 000 B = 10^12 B (when based on 10).
So 3 GB of Scrivener backups is just a very, very small percentage of 1 TB and definitely not the reason of your Mac storage shortage. And because of that removing them is not a solution if you ran out of disk space.
As for the size if the backups: Take the sizes of each project, multiply them by the numbers of backups and add all of them.
A total of 3 GB does not seem excessive at all. And that goes for projects with mainly text. One single project file containing bigger research movies can easily get that huge.
As for backing up on Google Drive: Are the backups zipped? If not, better avoid Google Drive.
And make sure all the backups are locally on your Mac before you upload them to any cloud service. Don’t move them directly between cloud services.
Lastly, just saving remotely is careless. Get an external drive of any kind for additional backups. Don’t delete anything before you have multiple backups.
Thanks for the warning! I’m not very tech savvy but am heeding your advice. Everyone at Appple freaked at this size. In comparison, the Apple Photoshop file was 4GB.