For a year, I stopped using Scrivener for iOS and iPad. I was spending way too much creative time troubleshooting disappearing files. That’s not glitchy, that’s potentially disastrous. gone. Still fingers pointed at Apple.
That blame didn’t hold up. Apple had already provided everything developers needed to transition. And most developers bit the bullet, did what they needed to and after the ineviteable usual early hiccups, their apps stabilized and moved on.
Except Dropbox. Instead, they bitched about Apple and gave us “workarounds” like, Just use Rosetta. Translation—we don’t give a crap if you’re having issues. Don’t blame us, it’s Apple’s fault. Right. Just run apps on modern hardware like it’s 2019 and Apple users can cross their fingers and hope for the best.
After two years of avoiding Scrivener on my iPad, I gave Dropbox another shot. It still sucked. Files vanishing again. And somehow, Dropbox was still blaming Apple.
That was it.
I finally moved all my Scrivener projects back to iCloud. Backups too. Now, I still write on my iPad and iPhone, but when I’m done, I export and load the work into Scrivener on my Mac.
No, it’s not as elegant. But it works. Problem solved.
And I stopped paying Dropbox for the privilege of losing my own work.
Agree plus if have a number of projects you use up the free tier quickly. On a pc use Google Drive 100 g for 2 dollars a month and save zip backups to extract and replace old projects on computer.
Please note that Google Drive is known to mishandle live Scrivener projects. It can be safely used with ZIP backups, but not uncompressed .scriv packages.
I only use Google Drive to hold zip backups which I listed, but did not clearly state I would not use Google Drive to store a live project, because this has been stated innumerable times previously.
I used pCloud for years to sync my files, but lately their desktop clients became unstable so I switched to Jottacloud. In both services, you save your files on a local hard drive where they stay and the application just pushes them to the server. I have never had any issues with any, including Scrivener files with these. Only difference between the two is that Jottacloud requires everything saved on their own folder (jottacloud) that the client monitors so I had to move everything from ~/Documents to ~/jottacloud/Documents but if I switch back to pCloud, I can just set it to sync that new location. On Finder I hid the default Documents shortcut and replaced it with the shortcut to new Documents folder.
Jottacloud is ~£62 per year for 1Tb storage (“Family” plan that allows you to share with the rest of the family members). I got the pCloud lifetime plan years ago, 500Gb was about £100 then, it’s £199 now or £60 p/a.
This is how all of these services work. The wrinkle that causes trouble is that some of them purport to “save disk space” with “smart” syncing, in which some of your files are stored exclusively on the server. Regardless of the service you use, we recommend disabling this “feature” with respect to Scrivener projects.
Dropbox works great for me, for all purposes I throw at not just Scrivener. Especially nice with synch of iOS devices for Scrivener due to its superb integration with Scrivener. I have 2 macOS and 3 iOS devices involved. All well. No problem–for a very long time flawless operation.
Dropbox Sync is not a backup service. It’s for syncing and should be used only for that. Dropbox also has a separate and distinct backup service which I use to backup my Synology NAS. Also works well which I have confirmed by occasionally doing test restores.
With pCloud you have to set that up separately from file sync and Jottacloud doesn’t even offer that, that’s exactly the reason I use them; I don’t want to be in a situation that I have no access to my files unless I am connected to a network.
As much as I don’t want to like DropBox (especially as I can only use it via a VPN here in China, sounds like a recipe for disaster…), it has not failed[1] me in years. Not one missing file, sync always happens quickly and reliably (NOT the case with my iCloud which I pay for just for picture storage, but everything else is significantly worse than Dropbox).
one exception was a macOS upgrade when they moved to a new OS API a few years back, where files wouldn’t sync, but I was also on a beta macOS and culpability wasn’t clear ↩︎
Reading the fragmented post you wrote implies that DropBox can be used by itself and that saving zips is an added safeguard. Writing in complete sentences would remove the possibility of confusion and allow you to impart what you know, which is considerable. Present yourself as you see fit, of course. My 2 cents are to be easily ignored.