Had to use a backup for current project, now can't open it on iPad

Scrivener
1

I use Scrivener 3 on both a Windows 11 PC and an iPad (synced thru dropbox). Recently I had to reinstall a backup of a project. That worked fine on the PC however when I open Scrivener on iPad and try to sync the project, it doesn’t work. I just get a list of recovered files.
I think this is because the path includes title-bak\title.scriv.
Should I have renamed the backup project to allow for syncing?

2

The backup location is dictated by the iOS version.

3

The one time I had to do this, I did change the project name.

My process went like this: I synced my iPad, put the iPad on airplane mode and turned WiFi off.

Then I switched to my computer, went into my Dropbox folder, renamed the broken project to [project].broken and then located the the backup and unzipped it before copying the backup project into the place of the broken project in the Dropbox folder on my computer. I chose to increment my versioning on the project name out of paranoia.

I waited to make sure Dropbox finished syncing, then shut down the computer. (I wanted the computer airgapped from Dropbox)

Picking my iPad back up, I re-enabled WiFi and wireless and had Scrivener sync and saw the backup project appear and it fixed my problem.

I am paranoid that if I update the local copy on the computer with a backup (with earlier system dates) and sync the iPad the broken project with later system dates will be detected as a conflict and will overwrite the restored backup, so that’s why I always increment my versioning.

Once you’re happy with the working copy, you can delete the extra copies. I have found that rename and delete instructions do work as expected through sync operations. But if I replace an earlier copy of the same file name will trigger Scrivener’s conflict routines and it works similar to how you described.

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4

Once you recover it, it isn’t a “backup” any longer. You’ll want to move it to the same folder (typically Dropbox/Apps/Scrivener) that you use for all your other synced projects. Maybe change the name so it doesn’t get confused with other versions.

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