To illustrate a cost/benefit analysis of this problem, imaging a first Amazon review like this:
★ One Star! Unreadable.
This book started off fine, but all of a sudden, there was a scene that made no sense. It had many new characters, almost as if it was a totally different book. Maybe the author had a seizure or something. Do not buy!
That would usually have been discovered when you and your proof reader read the final version, looking for typos, don’t you think?
Probably, and I admit I’m being overly dramatic, but let’s say it happens after that final version was created. You find a typo, and when you correct it you perform an inadvertent drag/drop followed by a compile.
Whenever I create a new version, I do a compare with the last version and make sure I didn’t cause such a major error, but not everyone does that.
Isa, I’m missing something in your suggestion to use backups as a way to correct an accidental move of a scene or chapter. Yes, I see that you can roll back to an earlier version. But let’s say you find a version three days ago, before you unwittingly moved a chapter inside another chapter. If you revert to that version, you lose all the work you did during the interim. What you want is a way to find the errant chapter and move it back.
In terms of saving dated versions for ready reference, what I do is compile my novel to a Word doc every couple of weeks, adding the date to the file name. I haven’t had to use it very often, but there was one instance when I had misplaced a chapter in the binder and not noticed it, and a look through the dated Word docs helped me see the original order and locate it. (A search for a key phrase in a long novel is much faster in Word than in Scrivener.)
You don’t need to roll back. Copy and rename the backup, open it and compare with your current project.
Is there a “compare” function? Or can you open the two files side-by-side? (I’ve never tried something like that in Scrivener.)
You can open two projects yes, in separate windows, and compare.
Spoken like someone who has never done real deep technical support.
No matter how smart you make the tool, the user has to be smart enough to use it. There are seldom technological solutions to behavioral problems.
Rarely have I encountered such a supercilious attitude toward users who are trying to make their best use of a product. Really. A product is supposed to serve the user, not the other way around. There are in fact many technological solutions that address what you call behavioral problems. Auto-save being the most obvious example.
I probably wasn’t clear on this point. In this particular case I wouldn’t revert, but use an old version to look at the scene order in the binder and correct the new version manually.
I see. Thank you. I thought I had tried in the past to open two projects simultaneously, and not been able to. But I see now that you can. All is clear.
On my computer, Word is much faster than Scrivener, so doing the same thing but using the Word exports is probably easier. Same principle, though.
There was some mention of sorting the binder by last date changed. I’m not seeing how to do that. (Using Windows version.)
The person who would have to do the work, and the people who would have to support the customers after the work was done, find it a persuasive argument…which is pretty much all of the people who need to be persuaded, no?
I agree that a lock on the folders would be a great benefit. It has happened a couple of times that a text or a folder suddenly “dissapeared” only to be found later inside another folder or text…
I therefore manually added a number to the folders to make sure that one did not go missing.
Without wanting to be rude, it doesn’t matter how ‘unpersuasive’ you find the reasons. The Mac developer(and owner of L&L) has said it’s a firm NO.
On very rare occasions he can decide something requested is a good idea after all (iOS Scrivener), though in this case as I read their replies, there are more negatives than positives. A persuasive argument backed up by facts if you have the technical knowledge to support may achieve a discussion, but saying the argument is unpersuasive, very unlikely.
End of the day, Keith & Co don’t have to persuade anyone their decision is the best. It’s theirs to make.
I’ve seen that there is on the wishlist and I am wondering if there is. It would be super sweet to prevent making mistakes when working on huge documents to have a lock and unlock icon. I use Scrivener for a lot of things, almost everything from book drafts to paper routes, since I am a paper carrier. It makes rearranging things a breeze. However I cannot count the times I accidentally nested stuff or moved it around.
When I work on books there is a structure to them and I name them like “Ch01 10 Title” but on a route, which has only the street names, that’s kind of hard, especially since most of the time it’s for new/sub routes and when I am reconfiguring it from the order suggestion I need to be able to shift it about without wasting time renaming them all. so a binder lock/unlock button would be ideal.
So any idea on when this will be implemented? Or is it there and I totally missed it in the new update?
I agree.
I too would like the binder to be lockable.
Use case – on top of what you just mentioned: on a touch screen, when you want to scroll the binder, sometimes it’ll move a document instead. And then you have to go chasing for it.
This said, one way you could avoid that (but it has its share of other issues), would be by adding everything to a collection, where moving stuff is of no consequence for the binder.
OMG touch screen use for windows is one thing I avoid at almost all costs when working on something like a route list. I actually almost always use my ipad when mobile unless I am doing some major changes in the back seat while traveling but on routes it’s ipad all the way because 90% of the time I need to scroll by touch and I haven’t figured out how not to select when I touch the screen on my surface pro.
Doing it by mouse is bad enough. 
It doesn’t work as it should.
In my case, I modified my scroll bars so that they are wider than the Windows default.
Yet I still sometimes miss the target…
Yeah, this would be a nice feature. I would definitely use it to keep me from, say, accidentally revising the wrong version of a draft. (Which is something I did the other day!)
However, in the past threads on this request, there was zero interest from L&L. My recollection is that, since this would not be a truly secure lock, their perception is it has no real value.
Best,
Jim