I have not updated my Scrivener installation in some time, and wanted to refresh my understanding of what’s involved with that before I do.
Standard precautions before updating:
Save Options in a .prefs file.
Backup customized files in D:\Program Files\Scrivener3\hunspell\dict\English-en-us
Backup wordlists.ini in AppData\Local\LiteratureAndLatte\Scrivener
Backup keyboard in .scrkbd file.
Am I correct that these backups are ideally just insurance, and that the installation should leave the above settings untouched? Are toolbars part of the .prefs file?
Is there anything else I should backup or be aware of re: the existing installation?
Then: I simply download the latest version, run it, point it to the existing installation (if it doesn’t find it already, which I’ll guess it will), and then let it go…?
Will it pick up the authorization automatically?
I’m not expecting a difficult update, but I know it sometimes happens, so just making sure.
Odd, when I check for updates in my current 3.1.1.0 installation, it tells me I am up to date. Any reason why that would be?
That looks like a pretty good checklist to me. The keyboard settings are saved into the settings file, so that would be a little redundant—but it certainly does not hurt to have them backed up separate.
Am I correct that these backups are ideally just insurance, and that the installation should leave the above settings untouched? Are toolbars part of the .prefs file?
Yes, the installation script will in this case transition you to a new wordlist file (the encoding changed from ASCII to Unicode) and a new registry master folder, all in the background.
Toolbar is in the registry, as are any favourite projects you have pinned (which is super annoying). Do note this issue with toolbars on upgrade. Activation is also in the registry, you won’t lose that even if you uninstall.
You could of course dump the Scrivener3 registry folder to a .reg file, which could later be restored in regedit if you needed to revert. For most people that’s a bit overkill, but if you have no allergies to regedit, it’s the most thorough.
Odd, when I check for updates in my current 3.1.1.0 installation, it tells me I am up to date. Any reason why that would be?
We’re working on a fix for that. Older versions ignore anything but a .0 on the end, thinking they are beta versions. It’s a hold-over from the public beta days. You might as well upgrade via the installer though anyway, as at this point you’d have to update twice, once to switch to a version that can read the new updater format, and then to 3.1.5. We overhauled the updater code to avoid problems like this, among many other things, like an opt-in beta stream you can turn on in the software with a checkbox.
It is possible that the update will reset your Hunspell dictionary to its OOTB state. I recall having to restore my dictionary when I went to 3.1.5.1, but maybe for some reason I did an uninstall/install instead of an update. In any case, after your update, check the size of your dictionary file en-US.dic. The OOTB dictionary is 680 KB; a custom .dic will likely be (much) larger.
Thank you, AmberV and JimRac! This is most helpful.
I am only now getting to all this. I have not yet done the upgrade on my 3.1.1.0 install.
But, I just just did a new install of Scrivener 3.1.5.1 on a new device and copied over some test projects. I’m wondering if any of the updates since 3.1.1.0 introduced changes to the project structure that could affect project compatibility, should a project happen to be worked on in an older version of Scrivener that it was last saved by. Hypothetically, of course!