I backed up Scriveners with Dropbox. It seems that Dropbox saves the files but in an odd way. Not the names of my chapter but endless numbers and letters. Looking on these files, you don’t know what they contain. When you click on them, it shows the text but when you don’t write the chapter number or scene number in the text, you need to guess where it belongs when you try to recover something. Do you have the same issue?
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HI Winnie2022. The behavior you’re seeing in Dropbox is the expected behavior.
That’s because a Scrivener project is actually a “container file” format. That means that it’s a folder with a .scriv file extension.
Inside that folder are the .scrivx internal index file and a boatload of subfolders and files. Those items you see with the string of characters are the files Scrivener creates and that index file tracks. That’s how the project’s binder is organized and opened in the correct order each time.
I typically advise users not to mess around with the internal components of that .scriv folder unless absolutely necessary.
The wiser approach is to open the project using the Scrivener software. Then, you can add, delete, and rename materials as needed. Scrivener will update its own internal structures when you do.
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The string of characters is called a UUID (universally unique identifier). When you create a new text document in the binder, a UUID is created. If you later change the name of the text document, the UUID remains the same. It’s basically like a fingerprint that wouldn’t change even if someone were to legally change his name 
As RuthS mentioned above, the general user does not need to view or use these data folders – rather, this is the internal organizational structure for a Scrivener project. The general user should simply interact with the .scriv project package file itself. Scrivener knows what to do with the contents.
You mention needing to guess how to find a chapter/scene to recover something. For recovery purposes, you might try Scrivener’s built-in features such as “Snapshots”.
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Hi Ruth and Cavalier,
Thanks for your reply. I understand this and you put my mind at ease.
But lets say my computer crashes or I buy a new computer. What are the steps to recover the Scrivener files from Dropbox in a way that I can simply continue with writing my book?
Sorry for these basic questions but I lost files with other apps before and writing is so much work. I don’t want to lose anything anymore.
Recover files from backups, not Dropbox sync.
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If you have a synced project on Dropbox, you install Dropbox on the new computer with a local Scrivener folder exactly as was on the old computer and sync.
The project should appear on your computer.
As mentioned previously, don’t go poking around in the internal files of the project, it’s a recipe for disaster.
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I think some of the confusion may be that a Scrivener .scriv project is “both” a file and a folder. It is labeled as, e.g., my_project.scriv, and it is a drag-n-droppable file; yet, if you double-click on it, you can see the contents of that package file as if it were a folder.
To answer your question: If you were to get a new computer, you would install Scrivener, then go into Scrivener’s File > Open menu, navigate to your Dropbox folder, and open my_project.scriv. The project should open up just as you left it on your old computer.[1]
Backups can be achieved in multiple ways. To backup stages of writing, Scrivener has a good “snapshot” feature. To backup the file itself, one way is to manually drag-n-drop the .scriv file anywhere you want. For example, you could simply duplicate the file and name the duplicate my_project_20241028.scriv to mark a backup with today’s date. Of course, it is preferable to set up an automatic backup routine using regular backup tools for your computer. For example, on a Mac, you could use Time Machine to backup your files daily. Personally, I use a program called Arq to backup all my active projects to a network-attached storage (NAS) hard drive – that way, the backup is off of my computer.
Cloud-storage solutions such as Dropbox should not be considered to be the same as a backup. Dropbox is convenient for sharing files across devices, but do not treat Dropbox as your backup. Dropbox can fail, just like any file on your hard drive. If the project matters to you, create a separate backup and store it somewhere safe (different computer, on a server, etc.).
There are some nuances related to settings and styles, which can be defined and stored in-app vs. stored in-project. (Very simply, you can choose whether certain settings and styles should be available to all projects or should be isolated to a specific project.) On the new computer, all the settings/styles that were stored in-project are preserved, since they are contained within the
.scrivfile itself. But any settings/styles that used to be store on your old computer’s version of Scrivener would have to be exported from there and imported into your new copy of Scrivener. Other system admins can advise you re: best workflows for this distinction. ↩︎
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