I look at Scrivener every NaNo season. My local NaNo club highly recommends it, but I am very much a Pages addict. (Old pages 09, I do NOT like the new Pages and refuse to use it.)
I find that I have a need for the “revert to” feature in Pages to go back and search previous editions of my writings and compare updated passages side by side from time to time. (sometimes LONG past versions, 6 months to a year old) Does Scrivener have a feature anything like this? If so, I’m sold as it is getting harder and harder to use the old version of Pages. Evil Mac OS updates default everything to the new version and won’t let you reset that darn default.
Thank you so much for your time. I do enjoy the NaNo trial of Scrivener and Aeon. I am an outline and timeline junkie, and I could see myself loving those interfaces. I just need that safety net of pulling up old documents without having 1000 separate save files.
Oh, and my little on loves Scapple. I may have to get that on his iPad for his random ideas.
Scrivener snapshots feature may seem just what you need. It allows you to generate saved copies of selected documents, even give then a name, and then allow you to compare and revert to any of these. Section 15.6 Using Snapshots of the manual will give you a through description on the topic.
Note, however, that Scrivener will not automatically take snapshots for you, the way Pages saves versions. You’ll need to decide in advance when you’ve reached a point that you might want to revert to.
You might also have a look at Scrivener’s backup options, which can be found in the Scrivener -> Preferences -> Backups pane. The automatic backups probably won’t help if you need to go back that far, but you can also take manual backups of the full project and keep them as long as you like.
There is an option in the Preferences to “Take snapshots of changed text documents on manual save”. It’s not automatic (though it may feel that way if you’re in the habit of using Cmd-S) but it’s a convenient way of keeping up to date snapshots across the project without needing to first select the documents. You can also title your snapshots in the inspector, which can be useful to identify particular milestones. I’ve found that really helpful when I’ve decided to just blow away a scene and try it again in a completely different direction.
When I’m deliberately taking a snapshot before a change, I also sometimes use an inline annotation at the top of the document to make notes to myself. That way when I’m looking through snapshots later, I can see what was significant about this shot. Sometimes I’ll use it as a way of copying in the summary (only the main document text is saved as part of the snapshot; inspector synopsis and notes aren’t included unless you copy and paste them into the text) so I know this is a snapshot of this particular version, before I changed it all. I’m pretty sure I stole that tip from Ioa, and it’s been a huge help when I rack up a bunch of snapshots.
It sounds like the Snapshots feature will work for those days where I have a “hate this passage” moment and rewrite a scene, only to want it back several months later. Now I’ll just have to get into the habit of using Snapshot and backup.
Maybe someday they’ll add that in as an auto feature like Mac Pages has with revert to.
I guess I’d best get to practicing…NaNo starts in just a few days!
Well with the aforementioned option, Take snapshots of changed text documents on manual save, it is going to roughly mimic how Pages works. In Pages (well, that’s how all auto-save works on a Mac, it’s not specific to Pages, our Scapple works this way as well), when you save, that sets a revision point on the disk that you can revert to. So binding the standard Cmd-S to save your project will, with that option, take snapshots of every document you’ve edited since the last time you did that (or opened it). You get the same level of version history using that method—plus you can make your own at any time and give them a more useful description in the Snapshots sidebar pane.
We can’t copy how programs like Scapple and Pages work completely, however. That’s an OS X level feature that is only applicable to single-file formats such as these. With more complex formats like Scrivener’s, this feature is incompatible.
