Scalability in Scrivener

[AmberV]

Scrivener projects are just special folders. Putting images, PDFS, and other media into a project will do very little to slow things down. When you drag media into the Binder, it is always copied in the project folder to keep everything together. If you want to have a special place outside of the project, or just wish to link to existing files in there current locations, take a look at the Reference pane. You can drop files and URLs into that. Of course, when using that technique, you’ll have to make sure those files travel with the project file when you switch computers. As for text…

From the FAQ:

@FAQ

:arrow: [size=100][7] [NEW] What is the maximum size of a project in terms of disk space, or how many files I can put into it?[/size]
The short answer: Don’t worry about it. Even if you used a single Scrivener project to capture everything you wrote for the rest of your life; everything you have already written; and everything that anyone has ever written about what you have written, you would still have enough space to import nearly every book, pamphlet, journal, thesis, magazine article, and newspaper trimming that has been published since the Cold War.

The technical answer: Due to limitations in the way documents are stored internally in a Scrivener project, there is a limit of 2,147,483,647 items that can be occupied in the Binder. However, the current version of OS X only supports that many files in a single directory, and a single Binder item can actually constitute up to three files on the hard drive, depending on whether you have links and notes in use. So, assuming the average person causes Scrivener to generate an average of two files per Binder item, you still have around 1,073,741,823 items available. Additionally, you are currently limited to 17,592,186,044,416 bytes per hard disk.

These numbers are far more massive than you will ever fathom, let alone require (in this decade at any rate). Practically speaking, there are performance limitations here and there with massive Scrivener projects. Most of these can be avoided by intelligently sorting information in the Binder so as to avoid having thousands of items in one single branch.