Today I opened a completed project for a published book. I meant to search for some text, but inadvertently entered that text into the first scene of the book.
Is there an easy way to make a project read-only so as to prevent an error like that? Something I can turn off easily if I need to make changes.
Hi Al,
I recall a few threads and lots of discussion about this, although I think the context was “How to lock a completed document.”
Making all folders and files in the Scriv project READ ONLY probably wouldn’t work, as I believe Scriv needs to open some for update purposes, even if the user doesn’t change anything. But I look forward to hearing replies from the Mac experts whether there is some MacOS method to accomplish this that will still allow Scrivener to run. 
To my knowledge there is nothing built into Scrivener to support this for documents or for projects.
One method that would work on Win or Mac would be to zip the completed project and name it specifically as your “GOLD” copy (or whatever). Then to view or change it, you’d be forced to extract a copy, so you’d always have the original unchanged.
If you wanted a version of that project available to quickly reference, you could keep a copy of it unzipped. Then if you inadvertently screwed up that unzipped reference copy, you could simply delete it and unzip another ref copy from the zipped GOLD version.
The goal being to always ensure you have a zipped backup available to refresh from, which is really no different than if you were working with an in-progress active project.
Hopefully that gives you some ideas to work with.
Jim
Yes, this is the approach we recommend. There’s no way to make a Scrivener project read-only but still be able to open it.
Katherine