This is looking like a very useful intuitive tool for a variety of uses. Can its files be saved to Dropbox, like I do with Scrivener? Thanks!
A Dropbox folder isn’t anything special. It’s the exact same thing as “My Documents”, or even “C:\Program Files”. The only difference about it is that there is some program automatically downloading and uploading stuff into it while said program is running and you are connected to the Internet. The only reason there is any kind of concern with Scrivener is that it requires many individual files to all be where it expects them to be, and programs like Dropbox can come along and duplicate files when it gets confused, forking them off into “conflicted” copies, causing Scrivener to lose track of your work. This can happen with any kind of file, if you don’t take care of synchronisation issues, but usually it’s just a lot easier to open two different versions of the same file and compare them visually, than to go through hundreds of files, some of which contain arcane code. Hence we stress extra caution up front so you don’t have to deal with that later.
If you end up with a conflicted Scapple file, no big deal, just open them both and choose the newer one or merge their contents as necessary.
Glad to hear you’re liking Scapple!
Thanks, AmberV! So far, I have had no issues with Dropbox (unlike with GoogleDrive). Nice to now Scapple can use it too.
Yes, as far as reliability goes, Dropbox has a very good record. The sorts of problems I’m referring to are procedural, not technological. For example, if you work for half an hour on an offline computer in a project, and then suddenly realise it’s an old version so you turn Dropbox on… poof now you have conflicted files all over the place, and some may contain important work that Scrivener cannot now see because the file name is “21 (conflicted blah blah).rtf” instead of “21.rtf”.
Indeed! I was there once and it took a bit of sorting to straighten things out.