I tried to import my project from my PC to my laptop last night. I use Dropbox. My backup was fine and Dropbox downloaded it as soon as my laptop was running. I was a bit confused by the results.
I ended up with some original work from the same project that I had transferred through a pen drive last week, and something called imported project right down at the bottom on the right hand pane. Does it not overwrite the same project?
Can someone tell me if I am doing something wrong, or what to do once I have this “imported project”? I now have parts of the original pen drive back up and the imported Dropbox folder too!
Thanks
Importing a project directly into another scrivener project via File->Import project will simply add that imported project’s documents to the original; it make no assumptions about the contents. You could, for instance, be importing the entire project used to create book one of a series into the project for book 2, so that you have all of the old research material and the original text in the same project for easy lookup.
If you are replacing one version of a project with another, then you should (typically) archive and delete the original and then copy the new version into the same place as the old version. You’d do this with the Windows file explorer; right-click the .scriv project folder and choose send to->Compressed (zipped) folder, then delete the folder after the .zip file has been created from it.
Many thanks…I will try that now!
No, sorry, I must be thick ha ha!
I have ended up with four versions of the project!
I couldn’t even find where my old scrivener project was located on laptop.
Totally confused. Maybe I am too old for all this and am not the hottest on a pc!
What exactly are you doing to get 4 copies? Can you break it down step-by-step, including which menu items you chose, which file you click on, etc…?
I made a folder within my Dropbox folder called Back ups. I clicked on back up to…found said folder and clicked ok. Nothing actually saved to that folder. I watched Dropbox and nothing happened.
I then decided to save to my pc desktop instead and used a pen drive ( this was the first time last week that I tried to move it to my laptop). This was my first move and it worked on import from pen drive. That was all fine.
Since then I have backed up several times on main pc ( have Dropbox listed as place to back up to in options). Don’t know where they all came from but I have some back ups from yesterday and two from today in my Dropbox folder. I have limited myself to five back ups.
Today I have just switched on my laptop and deleted as you described, the last .scriv project that was sitting on my desktop. Then I went into Dropbox and had four versions in there. From there I am stumped! I didn’t use Windows file explorer to find anything though as the last save was sitting on my laptop desktop.
Thanks for your help
I appear to have all my settings wrong I think. Scrivener is not keeping to the five back ups I requested, it’s doing more!
I imagine I am making this sound more complicated than it is.
In my toolbar I have my Dropbox icon. When I click on my folder latest back ups by clicking on that icon, there is nothing there. When I go to ***/documents/dropbox they are in the latest back ups folder!
I am in a total muddle and wish I had never started with Dropbox!
Find the most recent backup by the “date modified” in the windows file browser (it’s called Windows Explorer, by the way, not to be confused with INTERNET Explorer).
Right-click and chose “copy”, then go to where you want the main project to be (I recommend your Documents folder, or possibly a folder inside it that you create for your writing projects, to keep them separate from other kinds of files).
If it was .zip compressed, right-click and choose “Extract All…”
Rename the folder if it has acquired a .bak and/or a date in it’s name, but leave the .scriv at the end of the folder’s name.
You’ll now have the new file, ready to edit.
As for your many backups: If you do a File->Backup->Backup to… action, I believe that may exempt it from the limit of five backups. The limit is specifically for backups that are created “automatically,” which can be when you open the project, when you close it, and when you execute a “Save” as in File->Save or use CTRL-S*. I assume that if the “backup to…” backups are named to exactly match the pattern of the automatic backups, it may count those toward your maximum retained backups, if that’s important to you. I like to use Backup To… to create mile-stone backups, naming them for what is done (1st draft, or pre-major1st_edit), so it’s nice that they aren’t counted with the ones that are triggered every time I close the project.
- These are optional settings, found under Tools->Options->Backup. The “Backup on manual save” is the one that is triggered from CTRL-S or File-Save, and actually makes that menu item useful, since automatic saving makes it almost completely redundant.
Many thanks for taking the time to explain all this. I haven’t had chance today, but tomorrow I will certainly follow your directions.
Thanks again 