I’m onto Rev 2 of my book. I copied the old project into a new one, changed the name and hid the original. So the snapshots began anew. I thought this was a good idea at the time, but now I’m thinking maybe it wasn’t.
As you can see, I’m still learning to use Scrivener, even after a few years.
Is there a way I can copy snapshots from the original “chapters” into the same chapters in the second rev (vice-versa I suppose would work as well), so if I wanted to, I could go all the way back to the original?
Firstly, how did you create the new project? Personally, I would just use File/Save As… to create the new project and weed out anything you don’t want around. But if you really want a fresh start, at the very most you could use the File/Import/Scrivener Project command to bring all of the original files in with the greatest amount of data retention (Reference links and hyperlinks will still work, snapshots will be present, all meta-data in general should be retained). At the least you could drag and drop from the old project into the new one. That also will retain most meta-data and snapshots. In fact it’s kind of hard to get items from one project into another without their snapshots. You must have used copy and paste or something.
As for fixing this after the fact though, I’m afraid that isn’t going to be feasible. Snapshots are bound to Binder items by the internal ID number, and those are certain to be different when you drag the items into a new project Binder: it will re-assign them all new numbers, meaning the snapshot files in the older project will be pointing to slots that don’t exist, or worse, you’ll end up with snapshots for the wrong sections everywhere. So in general the best answer is to go back and transfer using a method that retains snapshots. Like I say, that’s as basic as drag and dropping the whole Draft folder into another project Binder (though note when doing so it ceases to be a true Draft folder and becomes a regular one, just drag the contents into the main Draft folder).
If you’re already a good part of the way through and restarting isn’t an option, you could import the original project or drag and drop the relevant items from the old binder to the new one, then for each pair of documents (old and new) merge them together. This will need some extra work, though, to do it cleanly; you’ll want to delete all the text of the old version (since presumably this is all saved in snapshots) so when you merge you won’t be actually combining document text. Meta-data, document notes, etc. will also all be merged or, where they can’t be merged, will use the initial document’s meta-data (label and status, for instance, can’t be combined), so you’ll need to ensure that is correct before the merge, or that you correct it afterward. As with the main text you’ll probably want to delete the old synopsis and notes, etc. to avoid combining it with the new text.
Rather than all that work, I’d just import the old project or drag and drop the particular scenes and store them elsewhere in the new binder, e.g. a folder called “Old Draft” or “Draft v.3” or whatever. The snapshots won’t be immediately in the current documents you’re working with, but they’ll be readily accessible if you really need them, and you can always copy and paste the text from the snapshot itself into the new document if you want to “roll back” to an earlier version.
You must have used copy and paste or something.