Q about synching with Notebooks via Dropbox

[Steenstrupian]

First off a gush of praise: Scriv 2.0 is fantastic and I am in love with it.

Query: I’m using Alfons Schmid’s (excellent) app Notebooks to work on a project across my MacBook Air, iPad and iPhone. I’m obeying his app’s instructions on this point:

If you use Notebooks of several devices and wish to keep the contents synchronized … you should activate Sync System Files in Notebooks’ Dropbox settings. System files carry the same name as the document they belong to, but they have the extension plist.

Since activating this option, it takes a little longer to synch, which is only the mildest faff, but every time I synch now with Scriv on my MacBook air, when the synch completes I get the following message:

All files contained in the “Draft” and “Notes” folders have been successfully synchronized with Scrivener. However, other directories were found inside the “Blah” folders, and files from these subdirectories were not imported or synchronised. Please note that Scrivener currently only supports the syncing of files contained in the top level of the external “Draft” or “Notes” folders.

I just ‘OK’ this and it doesn’t seem to make any difference, everything is working on the three machines. But (assuming I’m not making some ghastly error with this methodology) is there a way to deactivate that message after a first warning for particular projects, or something, because I’m spoiled and it’s bugging me a bit to have to see and dismiss it every single time.

Many thanks.

[KB]

Double-check that you are syncing to a subfolder within the “Notebooks” folder that you have created especially for your project and are not trying to sync to the entire “Notebooks” directory - could that be the issue at all?

Thanks for the kind words!

All the best,
Keith

[Steenstrupian]

@KB

Double-check that you are syncing to a subfolder within the “Notebooks” folder that you have created especially for your project and are not trying to sync to the entire “Notebooks” directory - could that be the issue at all?

Hm. Don’t think so. The sync is set to a specific folder, in my Notebooks folder, in my Dropbox folder, named ‘Blah’ (shall we say?), within which is ‘Draft’ and ‘Notes’ (both of which I’m syncing, as text). The warning message reads

other directories were found inside the “Blah”, Blah/“Draft” and Blah/“Notes” folders.

In the “Blah” folder alongside ‘Draft’ and ‘Notes’ is a folder called ‘Trashed Files’, and a file called ‘BookProperties.plist’, which I think has been generated by Notebooks since I activated that option mentioned above. That seems new, and I wonder if it’s that Scrivener is warning me about. I see nothing within either ‘Draft’ or ‘Notes’ which isn’t a .txt file of a specific scrivening I recognise.

Incidentally, the ‘Trashed Files’ folder contains what appear to be copies of all the .txt files comprising my project that are in Draft and Notes folders, but where their names in those folders is Whatever.txt, in the Trashed Files folder it’s Whatever.txt.plist. Also, there are multiple copies of each of them - Whatever.txt.plist, Whatever.txt-1.plist, &c. There are also, in “Trashed Files”, currently 5 copies of a BookProperties file like the one in the “Blah” Folder, named BookProperties.plist, BookProperties-1.plist, -2.plist, &c.

Combined with the fact that syncs appear to be taking longer now, what I wonder is whether when I work on the ipad or iphone, these plist files are appearing (maybe converted into this format from txt?) which then seem to get junked and the project reconverted to .txt when I’m back on my computer, then back again and so on. So as well as the question about that warning message, then, there’s a question about these .plist files proliferating. They are small, they’re not yet using up a huge amount of memory, but it’ll certainly rack up fast, and i don’t know whether there’s a setting to just automatically ditch them.

Any advice, brilliant Scrivener mavens?

[AmberV]

Yeah, I’d avoid using any options that dump non-project data into these sync folders. Those are meant to be mediated entirely by Scrivener. The main exception is creating new .txt files in the folders—it’s fine to do that. But invisible files, control files, random meta-data files, etc are just bound to muck things up. It’s not even going to work the way you want it, since Notebooks is going to expect those .plist files to be in one place, and Scrivener is going to keep moving them aside.

[Steenstrupian]

Thanks AmberV… But I’m a little confused now about whether or not I can safely sync between devices using Notebooks, which clearly does want me to activate that option. It’s by far my preferred of the apps - I like working on it way more than on Plaintext or Simplenote or Elements &c. I guess I’ll ask Alfons (he’s very good at customer response).

[AmberV]

Yeah, I’d ask him what is going on, and hopefully if there is a preference for this behaviour. Proliferating sidecar plist files all over the visible filesystem doesn’t strike me as a very pretty way of handling meta-data. I’m assuming that’s what this optional feature does, since obviously the data goes wherever Dropbox takes it, without any help.