It’s probably gauche to revive this thread, but I’ve been watching it with interest for some time and I finally couldn’t resist commenting. I consider myself something of an expert mouser, having been running OS X/MacOs forever, yet I too have fallen to the dreaded: “Wait, did I just move something in the binder? Oh well, I’ll just hit the trusty ole Cmd-Z and…” long pause “Huh.”
I am a pretty detailed outliner and I have an entire 9-book series in the same Scrivener project. With each novel broken out into Acts, Chapters, and Scenes that means checks project nearly 150 items (folders and files) per novel, not to mention the “Research” folder, the “Ideas” folder, the “Characters” folder, etc. I like to think I have a good memory but an inadvertent move in the binder is still both hard to detect and to unwind.
That said, I can respect the technical problem that would be “program a lock on binder moves”. In light of that I thought I would share my alternative solutions:
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brookter’s idea about sorting by modified date is quite clever and has been very helpful. That’s a good place to start.
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Since I’m a big outliner anyhow, I created a couple custom compile settings to print out just Part, Chapter, Scene headings and perhaps the scene synopsis (also some custom meta data in places) in a compact format. The result is a nicely detailed 3-10 page outline of the entire novel. A bit of prettying-up and you’ve got a detailed scene-by-scene outline with (or without) synopses–perfect for sending to editors/agents etc. During the development phase I make liberal use of the “Notes” section in each scene file. Add those to the “Outline” compile format and you have a great written document that keeps the entire project’s direction in hard copy. Side effect: That hard copy is an easy-to-access outline of the order of every file and folder in the binder.
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If you have the storage space, turn on the “back up with each manual save” option in Preferences->Backup and boost the “only keep [X] most recent backups” to a bigger number and get in the habit of whacking the save key a few times a day. This mitigates the “moved something in the binder two days ago and never caught the error and now all the backups have enshrined the error in the permanence of 10 backup files” problem.
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Every three months or so I increment the version number in my project name (e.g. “Series-v3” gets renamed to “Series-v4”). That has the effect of creating a new “backup epoch”. If you do this routinely, over the course of a long series development you now have a quarterly archive of old versions (and multiple backups of each). That’s nice if you end up with an error that propagated long ago. Also, if you are in film development or something if you ever have a rights fight over material you have a potentially years-long record of the progression of a project, an archive that is pretty solid “sole-authorship” evidence for copyright purposes. You might guess that I am a woman speaking from bitter experience on this point.
Obviously, my solutions are not for everyone and, admittedly, options 3 and 4 eat a lot of storage. Since all my research for the entire series is in my project it’s close to 100MB and that means 100MB per backup (not to mention the off-site saves on top of that). Still, “storage is cheap.” On big writing days I spend between 5-12 hours with Scrivener open. If you are a full-time writer it might be worth pitching for an external drive (4TB can be had for ~USD 100 nowadays).
Good luck!
-isa