Not sure if this is the best place to post this, but I’ve searched for a good spot.
I’m working on a novel and I want to go through and drastically change the order of my chapters. I’m a bit worried about doing this, because if I don’t like the new order, I don’t want to lose the old order. I took a screenshot in Scrivener of what I have right now, and then I started changing around the order of chapters. Just to see if it worked, I rolled back to my screenshot, hoping to see the order of my documents return to their original positions. This didn’t happen, and I’m not sure if it was supposed to or not. Is there something I’m doing wrong?
If screenshots don’t preserve the order of documents at the time they were taken, is there a better way for me to change the order of my chapters while still being able to return to the original order? Thanks for the help.
The snapshots functions work on an individual document basis, sdo would only roll back the changes made for a specific document’s contents - not for it’s position in the binder.
You really have two options for preserving the binder structure to memory.
make a copy of your project as a back up using the Save As command. That way you can mess around to your hearts content and have a complete project you can then open revert back to. Note that if you then went back to your saved version you would lose the any changes to the text int he documents.
Literally just take a screengrab. If you are running v1.2.1 or later you will be able to use the scratchpad to do this…
Open the Scratchpad: Ctrl+Shift+/
Open the screengrab dialogue: click on the little fist icon
Click “Grab an Area with Mouse” - this will put a green grid on the screen… select the binder and it will save that as an image showing where all your files are which you can then save with a name that will remind you why you took it.
You can then refer to this image at a later date and then manually move files back to where you had them. Not ideal, I suppose, in that it takes a little effort, but it preserves the changes you make in individual documents after your restor point, so well worth the effort in my mind.
There is still a bug that is making this more difficult than it should be. The Collections feature has many intended purposes. One of them is so you can experiment with alternate narrative orders. For instance you can drop the items representing your chapters into a collection and then organise them however you please. This in fact works great right now, even if your chapter items are folders. You can click on them in the Collection list and see their corkboards or read their Scrivenings contents. The problem is, right now there is no way to use a collection order to adjust the physical outline order in the binder. There are two ways to use a collection: as a playground or as a backup. I’ve already described the first scenario; the second scenario would have you drag your chapter items into the collection, then play with the order using the Draft folder itself. If you end up not liking the result, you could then just use the collection’s stored original order to bring the Draft back to its original state.
So yeah, unfortunately right now since this isn’t working at all, you need to use project backups or duplicated Draft folders to take a snapshot of the structure.