I’ve been using Scrivener on my Mac for a while and have overall liked the program. Today, I downloaded the mobile app in the hopes of being able to work on my project there, too, and everything has been a cluster since. The app shows my various attempts to open the novel on the mobile app, but says “Invalid project.” and then " The project cannot be opened because it does not contain a valid binder structure file." But all I did was save the current piece of work on my desktop to my Dropbox? I’m truly so confused. I also for months had been getting the error message on my Mac app for Scrivener that my project “is stored inside its own automatic backups folder. This could potentially result in data loss in the event of an automatic backup trying to overwrite the current project file. It is therefore strongly recommended that you close the project and move it to a different location.” I did that, but then have no idea how to have it be backed up somewhere else and also get it in Dropbox so I can work on it on my phone. I’m beyond frustrated to where this ordeal has ruined my entire afternoon. I had gotten old versions of my novel to open on the mobile app but can’t for the life of me get the current version to. Can someone help?
Have you tried this?
In addition to the link provided by @RuffPub, the symptoms and the error message you report suggests an incomplete sync, using the same folder for backups and projects. Both need to be fixed.
Put all you project *.scriv files in the same Dropbox folder and when synching, leave time for Dropbox to complete the sync up to their server, then down to your iPhone. Dropbox in charge of synching.
Configure your backups, as Zip files best, in a different folder. Does not have to be in Dropbox. I use ~/Backups/Scrivener.
While you are at it, setup and run TimeMachine to have routine and automated backups of your entire machine, if not done already.
The most common cause of this error is incomplete synchronization. Dropbox (or another service) “helpfully” “optimizes” your disk so that part of the project is stored exclusively on their server, where Scrivener can’t access it.
More information and what to do next can be found here: