The Tutorial said that my files would be saved to my hard drive. However, when Scrivener was installed, it automatically set it up to save to my iCloud account. Is that ok? I’m not a technical person, so I’m not sure of the ramifications of saving in different places.
Well, maybe.
It’s okay if iCloud is configured to replicate your local hard drive to the cloud, leaving one copy locally and one on the iCloud server.
It’s not okay if iCloud is configured to “optimize storage space,” in which case it will move files that are not in use, leaving only the cloud copy. Among several reasons why this is a bad idea, it can cause pieces of your project to suddenly go missing.
See this article for an explanation:
9to5mac.com/2016/09/21/macos-si … e-storage/
Katherine
That’s a useful article! I discovered 16 GB of downloaded podcasts on my hard drive 
I am not a real tech savvy person. However, I looked up .scriv in my Finder. The Scrivener application is on my hard drive, but the .scriv files are in iCloud.
I looked up the “Optimize Mac Storage” in System Preferences and unchecked the “Optimize Mac Storage” box.
The problem remains about how to change the default storage location in Scrivener from iCloud to my hard drive. How do I do that? I opened Scrivener and looked in Preferences, but I don’t see a place to make this change.
If you said “yes” when Apple asked if you’d like to have iCloud’s purview include all of your Documents and Desktop folders, then anything you have in those folders is on iCloud—conversely anything outside of those areas shouldn’t be.
Well, technically speaking the way things like iCloud Drive and Dropbox work is by modifying your hard drive based on instructions from over the Internet, coming from the server (and that is the end of it, it isn’t removed from your hard drive). So for example if you save a project into ~/Documents, the iCloud system detect that new file on your hard drive, and uploads it to the server. If you had a second Mac on the same account, iCloud would instruct it to download and assemble this .scriv onto its hard drive. That’s how “cloud” can be so fast—if you were actually working “on iCloud” then nobody would use it. It would be unacceptably slow, loading everything over the ’net in real time.
So ultimately, and very technically, the question to save things to your hard drive instead of iCloud is a bit meaningless—but if taken in the broader sense of, “I don’t want Apple uploading and downloading this work constantly = hard drive”, then: to save your project outside of the areas iCloud monitors, use any folder other than ~/Documents or ~/Desktop. You could for example visit your home folder and create a new top level folder there called “Scrivener projects”. I have a top level folder called “working”, and another called “archive”. I tend to kind of avoid Documents anyway since so many programs dump data there—I’d rather have locations I control in terms of organisation.
I think with default Finder settings Apple makes what I just described doing a little opaque—where is the “home folder” for instance. Try this:
- ⌘N to create a new Finder window.
- Use the Go ▸ Home menu command. Now you’ll see these “Documents” and “Desktop” folders, as folders, and can more easily avoid them for the files you don’t want on the Internet.
If you prefer the home folder view over that “All Files” thing, you can change that in Finder’s preferences.