I have a bunch of projects on my laptop that I do not want to use Dropbox to backup (I have multiple redundant backups). I want to have a project on my phone that I will use as a shuttle of sorts to get things onto my laptop when I am working on my phone (out of town, etc).
If I allow Dropbox to sync this Project on my phone (“Shuttle”)…will Dropbox/Scrivener automatically sync all of my projects, or just the one in my dropbox folder?
You can tell the phone to look at any folder you want within your Dropbox account. Dropbox/Apps/Scrivener is the default, but you don’t have to use that.
Note that the device will look at the designated folder plus any children. So, for example, my iPad syncs to Dropbox/Apps/Scrivener, but my iPhone syncs to Dropbox/Apps/Scrivener/Notes. So the phone sees only a subset of the projects that the iPad sees.
On the rare occasion when I do not want to access a project from any of my other devices I save it to the Documents folder on iCloud (I am using Scrivener on macOS). The majority of my projects are saved to Dropbox from where I can access them from my desktop and laptop Macs, iPhone, and iPad.
In short keep projects you do not want to sync out of the Dropbox directory hierarchy and your iPhone won’t see them.
Are projects in the cloud get backed up or do you just use it as a backup safety?
My Scrivener projects are stored in the (Dropbox) cloud. I backup everything, not only Scrivener projects, using macOS Time Machine and Apple’s iCloud.