The time stamp uses the “short date” format as set in your system preferences. But you can of course give backups any name you want - the filename with the date that is inserted by default is just a suggested name.
I came to the same conclusion the other day. I’m a Brit and so use dd-mm-yy(yy) dates normally. But yes, I didn’t want to have to retype the date string in YYYY/MM/DD format each time, so I have set my short date format, and only my short date format to that, as for all other purposes I use “DD Month, YYYY” as the format.
Being here in China, where YYYY/MM/DD is the standard format — sensible people! — it makes me wonder why I didn’t do that years ago!
Hmm, talking of sorting in folder lists, though, why would you use the file name in an attempt to sort by date? In Finder you can sort by the modified date of the file itself, which would give you a better result.
Well, my backups go into a folder on DropBox, so having the different project backups grouped by the project name first, and then for each project ordered in terms of the date and time of the backup means it is very easy to identify the most recent version of the particular project I want to work on on the other computer, and to delete the oldest versions if necessary. So “Project.scriv [2009_12_12-21_52-23].zip” or whatever works very well for me as a file name.
I also export a lot of the news item files I export from Scrivener as a date of the report + the initial of the original translator + a number if there’s more than one from them that day, e.g. 20091212m1.rtf
Thanks Keith for the explanation. I have adjusted my short format for date and time. It still puts in the square brackets, of course, and even though I changed my short time format to be 01-24 hours without colon or AM/PM it still adds a trailing underscore. Without manual adjustment I now am offered
Projectname [YYYYMMDD_HHMM_].zip
So in my ideal world I’d have a way to eliminate those - but what your advice gave me is quite workable for now.
I have no rational explanation for my preference to have sortable filenames instead of changing the folder sort method to Date Modified. Your question left me sullenly naked. xiamenese articulated it far better than I could have. I can only kick dirt and say I want what I want.
Blimey, no need to get sullen or naked! I’m not sure why you are getting the trailing underscore. For legitimate file naming reasons, underscores are set to replace “:”, “.”, “/” and spaces (2.0 won’t replace the spaces and will use a hyphen instead of an underscore), so my only thought is that you must have accidentally placed an extra space at the end of the time in your short date format. You should be able to edit back out in your System Preferences.
Xiamenese makes a good case, but at the end of the day an extra preference within Scrivener for setting the format of something obscure like this, when the title is intended as only a placeholder and you can adjust system settings, would be overkill.
What I could do is just change it so that rather than use system settings, it uses a backwards time format no matter what, so that it would always sort okay:
I’d be more than happy with that … I could set my short date back to its original UK format for those comparatively rare occasions when I use that in other documents.
I’m not sure why you are getting the trailing underscore. For legitimate file naming reasons, underscores are set to replace “:”, “.”, “/” and spaces (2.0 won’t replace the spaces and will use a hyphen instead of an underscore), so my only thought is that you must have accidentally placed an extra space at the end of the time in your short date format. You should be able to edit back out in your System Preferences.