I downloaded Scrivener back in December and I love it. In fact, I realized that it is pretty much the only program I use aside from my web browser, and I got tired of having to type up a ton of stuff that I hand wrote on my lunch break at work, so I bought a cheapish Windows tablet that I could put Scrivener on to and take with me wherever I go. I was already using Dropbox as my backup destination, but after reading through here, I now realize I am apparently doing it backwards. The project files are on my hd and the backup files are on dropbox.
The question I have is:
Is it going to confuse Scrivener or my poor laptop if I move all of those project files from the hard drive to dropbox? Where do I tell it to change that setting? I guess I should have bought the “dummies” book after all. I am going out of town for a week starting tomorrow and wanted to just take my tablet and be able to work on projects while I was gone and not worry about it. Should I create one folder in Dropbox for the backup files and another for the current projects? Right now one of my backup files isn’t even showing up in Dropbox on my tablet, and I have no idea why - and it’s my story bible. I’m a little tiny bit concerned about that one.
First, moving a project to dropbox is easy: Close Scrivener, move the .scriv folder & its contents to your dropbox folder, and Bob’s your uncle. You’ll have to direct Scrivener to open that project by double-clicking on the .scrivx file within the .scriv folder, or you can open it via Scrivener’s menu.
Second, you probably shouldn’t be editing the underlying files in the .scriv folder. For one thing, they’re not named like they are in the binder, and for another, there are features that require Scrivener to keep track of things for you while you edit, like footnotes and comments, which will be skewed if you edit the underlying 33.rtf file in the Scrivener folder. In short: you’re not meant to edit that stuff except through Scrivener itself.
You can work around this to some extent, though. Select a set of files and do a File->Export->Files to a dropbox folder. That will give you a set of file names similar to your binder’s contents, though they won’t be in order necessarily, unless you can sort by name and get the order you want. But the files will be there, ready to edit in a Rich Text Format (or other, if you select a different output when you do the export). Later, you’ll be able to sort by Date Modified on windows and find the files that you changed, then copy & paste in the contents over the originals in your project.
Thanks - I’m not sure what I said to make you think I was going to edit any files in the Scrivener project file, but if I did give that impression I didn’t mean to. I simply wanted to move them to Dropbox, which I did, after doing a bit more digging around (naturally, I found what I needed after posting). The only editing I wanted to do was on my book when I was out of town, in Scrivener, just on my tablet instead of my laptop. I just couldn’t find a spot in Scrivener to “point” the program to the new files, the way you can point it to the location for the backup files. I finally figured it out after I moved them and went to open them again and had to tell it where the files were again.
Just a little paranoid. I finally finished the rough draft of a novel and didn’t want to lose it before I start revising it.
The problem with editing with a tablet is that there is no tablet version of Scrivener with which to open Scrivener projects, thus my concern. I guess you have a windows 8 “tablet” computer, instead of a windows RT tablet-tablet? The first will run Scrivener for Windows, the other will not. It’s damned confusing when “Windows tablet” means two different kinds of OSs, which cannot run the same software.
One word of caution: read the section of the manual titled “Scrivener Everywhere”. Don’t put yourself at risk for a dropbox conflict, which can befuddle Scrivener and make it seem as if you’ve lost writing.
I can see the confusion about moving Scrivener projects vs. how it knows where to save backups, but there’s an easy litmus test to tell the difference. If Scrivener is creating a brand new project or a copy of a project, then you will either be prompted at the creation of that copy (Save As & File->New Project), or you will go to a setting (Tools->Options->Backup) to change the location where new copies will be created.
If you are just moving an existing file, then you do it just like you would with a .doc file; you go to the windows file manager (aka Windows Explorer–not to be confused with Internet Explorer) and move it yourself. There’s no “move file” function in the Word program either, to give you an equivalent example.
I am going out of town for a week starting tomorrow and wanted to just take my tablet and be able to work on projects while I was gone and not worry about it. Should I create one folder in Dropbox for the backup files and another for the current projects? Right now one of my backup files isn’t even showing up in Dropbox on my tablet, and I have no idea why - and it’s my story bible. I’m a little tiny bit concerned about that one.