I’ve been using Scrivener on my PC and am about to change over to a Mac. What’s the best way of saving my old files and then installing them on Mac?
Hi.
Backup every project as a time-stamped + zipped backup.
Backup those backups. (Cloud, external HD, … your choice.)
As for the transfer, the projects are cross-platform.
Just move them to your Mac. (Zip → Thumbdrive → Mac → unzip. Or email, cloud, any mean, really.) – Not mandatory to zip, but it insures the whole made it through in one piece. It’s preferable to do so.
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Keep in mind that that your projects might look different on the Mac when you didn’t have used fonts which are common on both platforms like Times New Roman or Arial. If that causes any trouble, you might want to change them on your PC first.
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Don’t forget to copy any Linked Images or Research files, and relink them on macOS…
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I would consider backing up your entire user folder on the PC, to an external drive, and then copying all of it to your Mac user folder. Obviously not all of will be useful, like the AppData folder, but there might even be things in there you do want (like Scrivener’s backups, templates you’ve downloaded or made for yourself, and so on).
This will dramatically reduce the complexity of transferring just this or that (never mind doing so correctly), and it will also provide peace of mind in knowing you have everything, even the things you’ve forgotten about, including and beyond Scrivener.
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To all the great advice you’ve already been given, I’ll add: if at all possible, keep that old PC around until you are absolutely 100% no-doubt-about-it certain that all your data made it over to the Mac.
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