I’m currently using Scrivener latest version for MacOS Sequoia.
I’m writing my second book, and referring back to my first book which was also written in Scrivener. It’s almost 80,000 words and takes a while to backup on exit. I’m fine with backups, I need them enabled.
The thing is, I’m not making any changes to my first book - just checking stuff/details, so I don’t want it to create a backup on exit - all I’ve done is search for something.
Is there a way I can exit Scrivener WITHOUT it automatically creating a backup every time? Turning off automatic backups isn’t an option.
There are several ways you could approach this which don’t even necessarily involve backup settings at all (e.g. accessing a compiled version of your first book, PDF, ePub…).
Or, just for the first book: Project → Project Settings → Backup → Exclude from automatic backups.
Hmm… I guess either of those could work (though I didn’t have a PDF to hand at the time as I wasn’t at home, and all that stuff is archived on a network drive). I didn’t know about the “Exclude from backups” thing.
The thing is, I had convinced myself there was a shortcut key you could hold down and it would change the Quit option to “Quit Without Backup”. I only found one that changes it to “Quit And Keep Windows” or something, and I’m not entirely sure what that means.
I was probably confusing it with some other software.
I guess I’ll just make sure I have a PDF to hand next time!
If I can come in here, I would recommend turning off backups on close for any project that is completed but which you might need to open to check occasionally, as they just take up disk space. For projects which I’ve completed, I do that and delete all but the final backup unless I can think of a good reason why I might sometime want to access an earlier version.
The manual (“A.2 Scrivener Menu”, p. 707) explains it perfectly, so I’ll just quote:
Quit and Close/Keep Windows⌥⌘Q Whether this will “Close” or “Keep” open projects upon next reload depends upon whether your preferences are set to reopen projects that were open on quit (subsection B.2.1). Which is displayed will be the opposite of whatever your standard settings are. This will not change your preference, it only influences how the software works this one time.
@xiamenese: Yeah I’ve actually disabled auto-backup completely now. After giving it thought, I think it’s the best solution.
I come from a software development background so doing manual backups to Subversion or Git or whatever isn’t really a big deal once it’s part of your daily routine. It also makes more sense as if I open/close Scrivener ten times in a day, I don’t need ten separate backups.
Please use some other form of backup as well. Managing project changes via Git et al. is unsupported, and reports from other forum users have been decidedly mixed.
Oh no, I’m not using Git or anything like that for Scrivener - was just saying that I’m used to running daily manual backups and that’s what I used as a software developer.
I’m currently saving Scrivener backups to a local folder which is instantly and automatically backed up to Google Drive (internet access being available at the time) - and that’s then automatically synced to my NAS drive. So at any given time I have copies of my projects in at least three different locations, including one cloud backup. Plus the NAS is backed up weekly to an external hard drive.
