I have searched and didn’t find a similar request so here it is:
To have the ability to select which project to sync on Scrivener iOS. Sometimes I don’t need to sync all my projects at once and only need to transition from my desktop to a more mobile platform like my iPad or iPhone to continue to work on a given project. The ability to choose which project to sync would make the syncing experience more seamless as in less wait for the process to be completed since it is not (yet?) a background process.
It’s possible to have subfolders within the Dropbox/Apps/Scrivener folder. So, for instance, you can have your iPhone sync to a subfolder that only contains a lightweight “notes” project, while your iPad gets everything. And of course there’s no reason why everything has to be in the Dropbox folder to begin with.
There is no ad hoc way to define a selective sync though. In my opinion, it would be a bad idea. I can easily see people making use of it, forgetting they did, and then opening an unsynced project, leading to all the usual sync conflict issues.
That’s a good way around it. I will try that, thank you.
I understand the risk of syncing discrepancies could potentially raise with the added complexity of a selective sync. I was seeing it more as an option. As the present iOS UI clearly identifies which project is or is not up to date even before syncing, one could still see which project is an older version needing sync before starting to work on it.
The main problem isn’t so much that we haven’t bothered to create selective sync, but rather that the tools we have available to build the sync engine don’t allow it. They are all or nothing, downloading everything in the sync folder no matter what. We can’t even selectively choose to only download “.scriv” folders and their contents. If you put a bunch of JPG files in there, they will be downloaded too, and completely uselessly so since Scrivener can’t open JPG files.
So that’s just a limitation to be aware of, and why we recommend using the sync folder as your “WIP” area, not your archive-for-all time area.
Exhuming this discussion after three years…
I still dream of some kind of selective sync. I’d like to use Scrivener on my iPadPro, but due to the size of my project and the sync time involved, I am not able to.
Has anything changed (with the tools, or with Scrivener, or with L&L) that would allow Scrivener to sync selected parts of a Project?
For example, it would be great to sync only Compiled Documents.
Or to ignore the (very large) Snapshots folder.
Or to ignore the Research folder.
This is an issue with the cloud service, not L&L’s programming. To the best of my knowledge, DropBox, iCloud, and OneNote sync to and from a specific directory, and selecting yea or nea on each project you don’t wish to sync is not supported by the cloud services currently.
Alternative: Have you tried using a dual-port (USB-A on one side and USB-C on the other) thumbdrive and working off that instead of cloud services?
You do not have to use sync, that is an unfortunate misconception I have seen floating around here and there. This is an optional feature you had to enable at some point, and by default the iOS version does not sync at all. For large projects I would just use Finder to manage it directly, like you would an external disk. That’s going to be way faster anyway. We even recommend that method for people that do want to sync, as you can save yourself a lot of time by getting the projects physically on the device over a wire, and then use the much slower Internet for incremental adjustments after that point. So this would just be skipping the slow part and handling the large project directly.
But that aside, I don’t think hypothetical selective sync as a concept would do what you’re thinking it would. What you are describing would result in broken projects that are not fully downloaded. The original request was to only sync one or two projects out of many, and that already has a very simple and elegant answer of not putting the projects you don’t want synced into sync folder to begin with.
For the Research folder, our recommended solution is to use the Research Files as Aliases feature and store bulky Research materials outside the project.