Super excited to get started with Scrivener 3 and just want to make sure I’m being careful before deleting anything I don’t need. When backing up my project that is now running on S3, there are S1 files in my Dropbox. Should just delete those as not to get confused or should I just let them phase out as more backups are created?
And when opening a S1 file in S3, Scrivener automatically does a backup from when I last used the old version. I heard this is for if I want to go back to S1? (But a little confused how that works since it only saves that one version?) Not sure where I should place this, either keeping it on my desktop or moving it to Dropbox? Just curious how people are organizing it.
The backup that Scrivener makes before converting a project allows you to go back to the situation immediately before the conversion. It’s primarily for use if the update fails for any reason, but would also come in handy if you took one look at Scrivener 3 and hated it, or if you had some kind of crashing issue right off the bat. It’s completely separate from all other backups, including Scrivener’s automatic backups, and so it is safe to delete once you’ve satisfied yourself that you’ll want to continue with Scrivener 3 for the time being. (If you decide to revert after a couple of weeks, you’ll want to use the command to export a Scrivener 1 project, so you don’t lose any work you did in the interim.)
Whether to delete other Scrivener 1 backups is entirely up to you. If you made a milestone backup when you finished the first draft, you might want to keep that, but maybe not the weekly updates since then. Scrivener doesn’t care. It’s always a good idea to minimize confusion by giving useful names to backups that you plan to keep. “FirstDraftDone” or “May15Revision” is much more informative than “MyProject.bak1.”
Thanks for the help! I’m mostly taking notes plotting and researching now so not expecting to want to revert anytime soon. Thanks for the advice re: drafts and revisions, I tend to get confused easily and can see that being really helpful in the future.