I’ve got a fairly noob question to bother you guys with today. I’ve been using Scrivener for a few months now and find it extremely useful. As a simple practice from work, I’m used to saving all my rough drafts while I’m editing them. So it’s usual to have file names such as “Annual report_v1”, “Annual report_v2”, “Annual report_v3” etc etc. (Golden rule: “x_FINAL” is never a good file name )
Now let’s say i’m writing a script with Scrivener and I’m interested in keeping a similar practice of saving my previous drafts. Do i keep saving the entire project as different file names ? I find that a tad cumbersome because I don’t want that many versions of my research folder. My ideal workplace would consist of a single research folder with multiple draft folders to check all the previous changes made.
I’ve tried searching the forums but haven’t been able to find any elegant solution. What would be the simplest way to go about this? Thanks in advance.
Highlight your Draft Folder, hit File, Duplicate with Unique Title and Subfolders, name this new file something Helpful (I use First Draft, Second Draft, Third Draft, etc., but then I’m unimaginative), and move it to your research folder. When you accumulate more drafts, simply create an Old Drafts folder and keep them in that.
Quick note on this–the “Duplicate” command doesn’t work directly on the Draft folder currently on Windows, so instead I suggest selecting all the contents of the Draft folder and using Documents > Group to put them in a new folder which you can either duplicate or just drag to another location, depending whether you want to retain a copy of the files in the draft for your next round or start fresh.
You can Alt+click the disclosure triangle to expand or collapse all subdocuments, so an easy way to select the Draft contents is to collapse the Draft and its subdocuments, then regular click on the triangle to expand it only to the first level and use Shift+click to select the contents.
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