I have a project (a novel) in Scrivener Ver. 3.1.60. I’ve noticed C:\\Files\Data folder over 200 subfolders with lengthy alphanumeric names such as 01E6A578-570E-40E4-90AE-20E1E5915BB0, and the like.
At least 80 of those subfolders are empty. My project appears not to be missing anything–at least, I’ve compiled the novel, and the complete text appears to be there. Are empty subfolders of the type I’ve described a normal occurrence? Or is something under the hood missing?
Many thanks.
Ken
Each of those subfolders corresponds to an item in the Binder. The alphanumeric code is a unique identifier Scrivener uses internally, since the title you use can change, isn’t necessarily unique, and can use characters that aren’t legal in filenames.
If the corresponding Binder entry has no text, notes, or synopsis, then the subfolder will be empty. 80 still seems like a largish number – although it would include items in the project Trash – but I wouldn’t worry about it if the project seems to be behaving correctly.
(Also, just a reminder that there is no safe way to edit the contents of the .scriv folder other than Scrivener itself.)
Nothing is missing, necessarily for that reason alone, such empty folders are created as soon as you add a binder item. They won’t contain anything until you add content somewhere to it (other than the title or metadata flags).
This oddity is in fact something I have on our list to review, as the current system doesn’t really make a whole lot of surface sense. There may be some reason I’m unaware of, but in most cases it is trivial for software to create a folder if one doesn’t already exist, for the purposes of storing files within it, so there should never be a reason for software to build empty folder hierarchies for data that might exist but doesn’t yet. And indeed that is precisely what Scrivener will do if you delete one of these empty folders and then later write text, synopsis or inspector notes content into that binder item—it will create the folder and write the files.
So if possible it would be nice to fix this, as empty folder hierarchies in large quantities clutter the disk, slow down backups, sync and other issues.
One reason might be that empty Binder items can still have metadata attached to them.
All of the metadata is in the .scrivx file though. The data that the folder requires is for main text content, inspector notes, synopsis text, style usage in the main text and notes files, and lastly comments & footnotes attached to the any of that. So there can be up to six files in there for such extended text content, but if the item is solely a title and a label, some bookmarks and some keywords, for example, there is nothing that would be stored in the folder.