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.
For projects that I work on for years, I wish I had a backup from, say 6 months ago or a year ago. But it keeps overwriting them with newer ones. After a working session of course I want a new backup. But if I’m just opening to check something and then closing it’s counter productive and I don’t want to change the setting each time. I guess the only way around would be to manually check into your backups once in a while and give the oldest one a “permanent” name. ???
If you don’t change anything, Scrivener won’t make a new backup.
Still, I recommend two additions to Scrivener’s automatic backups:
Use the File → Backup → Backup To command to make a manual backup at major milestones or before making major changes. Put it in a safe place outside of Scrivener’s automatic backup folder.
Have some form of full system backup, too. For Mac users, a Time Machine volume is easy to configure and use.
If you are backing up your drive in any fashion, that will of course grant you access to older versions of these backups that may no longer exist on your local system. That can extend to some cloud sync services, and more so to online backup services.
An option that I like to switch on in Scrivener’s backup settings is the date stamp setting. This ensures each backup has its own name, which is a lot less confusing to work with than the above. Instead of going through dozens of copies of “ProjectName-bak1.zip” files, it will say exactly when the backup was taken right on the filename in the backup system’s browser.
The other setting, of course, is the one that controls the cap on how many are saved. Set that as high as you can afford to.
For old projects that are “reference only” you might consider turning off backups for that project (as described above). It’s a little more risky to do that, so what I do when I retire a project is put an entry at the very top of the binder, using the icon, that says, “BACKUPS OFF”.
icon, that says, “BACKUPS OFF”.