I saved my file after my last session and after a burst of brief creativity I went to open my files to see a back up zip saved as a series of numbers and letters? Is there a reason for this?
Thank u!
That sounds like an automated backup.
Are you saving your backups to the same folder as your projects? If so, that’s not best practice. Backups should always be saved to a different location, preferably not on the computer where your projects are. Cloud services are fine for zipped backups.
Also, don’t you just go File > Recent Projects to open your projects? You wouldn’t see zipped files on that menu.
Yes I do, and that’s where the numbered document appeared which is why it weirded me out. I assumed it was a back up but since I had never seen it save as a series of numbers it jumpscared me a little.
As for my backups, I tried to save them into a specific folder inside of another folder I have specifically for writing but they seem to just save outside of it so
Writing > the back ups save in here
Despite me trying > Writing > back ups
My projects have their own folder within my writing folder and I also save to an external hard drive
What do you mean “also save”? you doing a “save as”? Why are you doing this? This might lead to confusion about what is the current version of your project? Is it what’s on the external drive? or the internal drive? You keep track of that ok? Me … I don’t do “save as” ever (as I recall) but I’m aware there is a purpose that others may comment.
Re your troubles with setting backup location, what is the exact full path that you are trying to save to? Does the folder exist when you are trying to save it? Do you have permissions to save? What is the symptom of the failure?
I save my backups and projects to:
- backups ~/Backups/Scrivener (25 copies, auto on close, not the default location which I don’t like as too buried into the ~/Library folder structure)
- projects ~/Dropbox/Apps/Scrivener (since I sync to iOS Scrivener). If not using Dropbox, I would be putting them into the local drive ~/Documents/Scrivener.
I rely on TimeMachine (et. al. as I have a. 3-2-1 backup regime) to take backups of all of the above (backups, projects, and full system) to an external drive (and NAS).
The “~” is the symbol for the user’s home folder.
What are you using to view them? If you’re using for example a web page that lets you look at your uploaded Scrivener projects on a cloud share, it might show you the internal parts of the project you wouldn’t ordinarily see on a Mac. By strings of letters and numbers, are you talking about something that looks like this: ADAEBA0E-3BCF-4BF7-8F28-4ED6E709C8E5?
If so, it’s not something to worry about. This is just how Scrivener refers to the bits of projects internally. It uses random identifiers like that because that works better for machines than transliterating your binder names to file names.
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Ah thank you! That’s a big relief. I think it scared me bc I’ve never had the document save as the number series this is a big relief thank you very much 
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