Do you use File->Save As to “back up” your project?
Another possible reason you have so many copies is that you may have been opening non-zipped backup projects in the backups folder.
For example: “Take Me Back Scriv” would have backed up to “Take me Back Scriv 1”, and the 2, 3, etc… up to the maximum number of backups that you were keeping. If you went into the backups folder and opened “Take me Back Scriv 3”, made even the tiniest change, and then closed it, Scrivener would then create a numbered backup of “Take me Back Scriv 3”, naming it “Take me Back Scriv 3 1”. As you kept opening those backups, backup names based on those backup names would add another number to the end, as you see in your screen shot.
I suggest you do the following:
You say you moved your backups to a new folder. If it’s solely for backups, then make sure it’s named to reflect that. I have a folder called “Scrivener Backups” so there’s no confusion as to its purpose. If you think you might use your folder for other purposes, create a “Scrivener Backups” sub-folder and move your backups into that.
Then, go to Scrivener->Preferences->Back Up, and choose your “Scrivener Backups” folder. While you’re there, check the box for making them ZIP compressed, and the option to add dates to the backup filenames. That’ll make a lot more sense than the numbering scheme I’m seeing.
Finally, decide what you want to do with all these other copies. Maybe keep them until you’ve generated a number of backups for a project from your new settings, then delete them to de-clutter.
If you ever need to examine a backup file, copy the most recent backup (you’ll be able to tell that by the date in the filename) to someplace else. Maybe near your working copy. Unzip it, and then you can view it alongside the original to do whatever it is you need to do with the backup. Once you’re done, archive that copy (there’s a right-click menu in the finder to compress into a .zip file) and move that backup to your “Scrivener Backups” folder for safe-keeping, and to prevent future confusion about which is the “real” project.
One other thing that’s not Scrivener-specific: If you don’t have one already, get an external usb hard drive that’s at least twice the size of your mac’s internal hard drive. Plug it in and tell your Mac to use it as a Time Machine backup drive. Or sign up for Backblaze. You need backups separate from your Mac for all your files (Scrivener’s own backups included) that aren’t just a reflection of what your files look like right now. Dropbox and other sync services keep current copies of your files–they don’t keep a history of past versions for very long, if at all.
