How big is your largest project?

Scrivener
1

I use Scrivener to collect all of my work as a marketing copywriter. One client’s project sits at a comfortable 477MB, and it only contains articles (134k words worth) and the accompanying images.

How big is your largest project?

2

I have a scrivener review project with images at 120 mb and a project to teach me writing at 176 mb and often have both open together with my first novel working on and no problems

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3

The largest project I have ever seen in a support context was over 10 GB. It was a law firm attempting to use Scrivener as an email archive tool. (Performance was pretty poor. We don’t recommend doing this.)

My own personal projects tend to be pretty small because they are mostly text. I keep most research materials in DevonThink instead.

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4

10GB? Goodness gracious… their backup time must have been through the roof.

5

I think backup time was one of the reasons they were requesting support.

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6

Every time I have done IT for lawyers or legal departments, I have always been amazed by how unwilling they are to spend money on decent tools for the job instead of jumping through hoops contorting inexpensive software into pretzels trying to perform functions it was never designed for.

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7

Out of interest, Katherine, what do you like about DevonThink, or find that it does better, in comparison to keeping your research in Scrivener?

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Two reasons, somewhat related to each other.

The first is that I tend to revisit topics after months or years, well after the “life span” of the original project. Keeping a single archive in DevonThink works better for me than trying to figure out exactly which Scrivener project contains the file I want.

The second reason is that because I tend to revisit topics, I’ve accumulated a fairly large archive over the years, totaling more than ten million words. As a purpose-built database, DevonThink’s tools for handling that amount of material are much more comprehensive than Scrivener’s.

I find the two programs complement each other extremely well.

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9

Thanks for the reply, Katherine.

I am not familiar with DevonThink, other than having read about it on the forum, and having subsequently watched a couple of YouTube videos about the programme, so what you say is very interesting to me.

Ten million words! Holy cow.

Thanks again.

10

The DevonTechnologies forum is full of helpful people. Definitely worth a visit if you’re considering the application.

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11

Thanks, Katherine.

I had taken a look at DevonThink prevoiusly, and had decided that Scrivener was fine for me, but if I ever consider or need something more, I will definitely take a look at DevonThink again, and I might even pop across to the forums now for a quick look.

Thanks again.

12

I do the same thing, though I found that using metatags helps make everything work better in Scrivener. I will take a nice long look at DevonThink… it might be more useful than Scrivener is for my professional work. (Right now I am typing in Word and importing each article as I complete it, plus there are a couple of projects filled with fiction writing. But who here doesn’t have several of those floating around? Lol)

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