Hello! I’m looking to move to using an iPad exclusively and was hoping to use Scrivener as my word processor to replace my beloved Liquid Story Binder. However, after seeing the enormous multitudes of problems and people screaming “don’t buy!” and “this software is useless” because of syncing issues I’m hesitant, but am wondering if the problem even applies to me.
I do not need to sync my writing between different devices. With Procreate, Affinity, Forger, and hopefully Scrivener, I want to make my iPad my main device.
I’ve never used any syncing or backup program of any kind. I do all my backing up by zipping up my Liquid Story Binder files and then emailing them to myself once a week, which has worked just fine for me for well over a decade and I’m perfectly happy to continue on this way. Now that I also have access to iCloud I thought that could be a viable option also (backing up the zipped file or similar to the cloud).
If I don’t need to sync between devices, will these syncing/Dropbox issues even apply to me? Scrivener doesn’t need Dropbox to function properly, right (syncing aside)? I really want to use this program but want to make sure I’m not missing something first.
If you’re willing to manually select a project out of the list in Scrivener, then you can easily upload a .zip compressed backup file to any service that iOS can send to. That includes attaching to an email, uploading to Google Drive, or other installed apps that can accept files.
To do so, you tap “Edit” on the main screen of scrivener, then tap ONE of the radio buttons that appear next to each project (you have to do this for each individual project; it doesn’t work if you select multiple projects at once) that you want to upload somewhere. Scrivener then gives you a list of apps that can accept the .zip file. Swiping up also exposes some services, including the built-in “Save to Files” function, which includes the ability to upload to iCloud Drive.
I think most of what you heard about was probably bug in iOS 13 that Apple fixed some time ago. Unfortunately people tend to blame the messenger, so to speak. Pity to hear there are people still around repeating bad information though.
And then again, like you say, not everyone needs to sync (I don’t either, but for different reasons, I do use a Mac primarily, but iOS seldom enough to be satisfied with dirt basic copying). The program was always designed from the very start to be data friendly and transparent. It stores your files openly, using standard formats that any text editor or word processor can open (not that you’d need to in a typical scenario, that’s more of a worst case scenario data recovery thing). No lock down, no subscriptions to database services—just a typical file storage area you can copy stuff in and out of, either using Finder on the Mac or Files.app on the tablet itself. Sync is strictly optional, not even enabled or demanded up front.
That’s a piece of cake with Scrivener. You go into project edit mode, select the project to back up, export it, and then select a target to send it to. It’ll send a .zip file, so you can store it either locally on the iPad or have it uploaded somewhere, even sent as an email attachment if you want. And in iOS 13 you can now use Files to unzip, so it’s pretty easy to manage your Scrivener project backups from right within Files (we expose Scrivener’s internal storage there for convenient drag and drop access).
Thanks for taking a look at Scrivener! And by the way, you can download a copy of the tutorial from our user manual page. If you have a PC you could open the .scriv itself in Scrivener for Windows, but if not there is also a PDF in the .zip file.
