This is more of a report in order to try and prompt a solution than it is an actual question given that I sort of “solved” the short term problem…
I am using Scrivener on Linux at home and Windows at school. I am syncing with Dropbox. I am heeding the advice regarding single open copies and completing syncing prior to closure etc. I did error once in closing scrivener but I made a copy renamed it, saved, continued working and don’t believe that that instance has anything to do with this problem.
So if I work in Scrivener at home (Linux) then work at school (Windows), when I come back home and open the project (Dropbox) I get conflicted files in a newly created files folder. The project will not even open, it only tells me there is a problem and shuts down leaving the conlficted files in the Files (case conflict) folder. Through experimentation I have found that IF I manually change the case of the files folder to capital F prior to opening the synced project on Linux after working in windows, it opens just fine as it was when I worked on it.
So as I said, problem solved, project recovered. The question remains…
What the capital F in files is going on here!
It’s been a long time since I used Unix… but IIRC, *nix and Windows differ in their views on the case-sensitivity of file and folder names. So I suspect one of the two is failing to respect the case specification of the other. That is, one thinks that “Files” and “files” are the same, and the other does not.
That makes sense, I was just surprised because I hadn’t noticed it in any of the explanations about cross platform use, dropbox, etc. I very well may have missed it as my first approach to a problem is generally to fiddle around until I fix it or until I make it so much worse that the answer is twice as hard to find!!!
I would be interested to hear from a linux user that has found a way to do this without manually renaming the folder everytime.
Try making a ZIP backup on either system, and transferring that via Dropbox. It may not fix the problem, but it will at least keep Dropbox from making it worse.
I’m linux only these days, but when I do transfer projects, I either do so over the network, or if I use dropbox, I compress it and transfer it outside of Scrivener. Granted, I don’t use OSX or Windows. I’ve had no issues using both the Linux version and the Windows version of Scrivener with WINE, so your issue must be dropbox. Then again, there are many users who’ve not had the issue. Some distros handle case differently.
It seems to me like it’s more likely because creating a scrivener project in Linux creates folders with different cases than the Windows version of Scrivener… maybe someone more techie can verify that?