I just watched a tutorial video on snapshot.
According to this video, there is an option under the snapshot menu bar to take a snapshot of all documents in the project. My version of scrivenor does not have such an option. Why not?
It would be very useful for me to take a snapshot of all my documents.
Thanks.
Hi,
No video I’ve seen states this. As far as I know, Snapshots is a document-level feature: under the Snapshots command you can take snapshots of multiple selected documents, but to take snapshots of all the documents in a big project would to my mind be cumbersome.
Better to duplicate the project (Cmd-D) and stash the duplicate elsewhere in the Binder, or use the Back Up command to save a copy of the project to your hard disk, in my opinion.
h
It is possible to take snapshots of multiple documents at once; just select them all in the binder and then use Cmd-5 (which, with a multiple selection in focus, will switch to Take Snapshots of Selected Documents). This is handy for embarking on a large revision session or what have you, though I agree with Hugh that it’s also a good idea to just make a full project backup as well, using File > Back Up > Back Up To… Snapshots are document level, so they’re only going to preserve the text of the document (and are linked to the document, so if you trash a document entirely, the snapshots are trashed as well); they’re fantastic for comparing changes, rolling back to earlier versions (or just copying out specific changed bits), etc. but you probably also want a copy of the whole project so your binder structure and meta-data are preserved as well, just in case you do a lot of reorganization and then later want to check how you originally had it.
This menu command was removed as it is very rarely used or really necessary, and having it there makes it easy to accidentally make a huge mess that is hard to correct since you can’t bulk delete snapshots (at least, without knowing how the internal components of a project work, you would probably need tech support to figure it out). You can still take bulk snapshots though. So if you really want to snapshot your entire draft, use Project Search to search for an asterisk, setting the search to only match your draft folder (it might be called something else and the menu name will change to reflect that). Then select the search results and hit Cmd-5 to duplicate them all. An alternate way of doing this would be to click on the draft folder, set the editor to outliner, make sure the application focus is in the editor and not the binder, hit Cmd-9 to fully expand it, and then do your Cmd-A,Cmd-5 to Select All and Snapshot Selected, from there. Note you can use the titled snapshot option in bulk mode as well. The title will be applied to all of them, so if you are ready for revision 2, you could type in “Rev. 1” to easily distinguish between this and other snapshots you’ve taken.
Hugh’s advice is also good. It’s down to preference whether you want your revisions in forks or embedded in snapshots. There are pros and cons for each, but most of them are fairly subtle—like what it is like to reference the old revision in a split. With the forked draft method, you have access to the View/Go To/ sub-menu to load the old revision and all of Scrivener’s navigation power otherwise. With a snapshot you need to open the Snapshot window and drag the old revision to the split’s header bar. Neither method is really “better”, just different. Another difference, snapshots are immutable, but old revisions stored in a fork are not, so you can continue highlighting and annotating them. If you work that way, that’s something to consider. Other people want them immutable, so snapshots are a better choice. Snapshots have a compare mode, two arbitrary files in the binder do not. Like I say, most of these differences are subtle and really only become important once you have a fairly deep familiarity with the software and a preferred way of using it.
One point of clarification on the above advice, I think Hugh meant “duplicate the draft” not the project. You can fork the whole project too if you want, but it’s usually better to do your revisions in a single project, especially if you want to see the old revision now and then. To duplicate your draft, nothing could be easier. Just select it in the binder and hit Cmd-D.
Thank you very much!
Sorry for my late reply. For some reason I didn’t receive a notification email letting me know someone commented on my thread.
I’m happy to hear there are several options. For my present purpose, I will use command D to store a copy of the draft and will try also making a total snapshot. I’m not sure whether immutability is important for me as I’m fairly new to Scrivenor, although I suspect being able to compare an entire draft might come in handy at some point.
Just as a suggestion, I think having an easily accessible total snapshot option might be useful. That way new users can play around and figure out what sort of back up options suit them best, with an added disclaimer that excessive snapshots are cumbersome.
Thanks once again.
Well, like I said we did have it for a while, but it was removed because it made more of a mess than it was useful having it around. You have to consider also that some people use a lot of items in their draft. They might have 500 or more items for a single book, and some might even have multiple books of a series going on. So running snapshot on the entire thing is wasteful and since you can only easily delete one at a time, you just end up with a project that is twice as big as it should be. And like I say, if you really want it, you can just fully expand the draft in the outliner and still do it. The feature is still there, it just has a “safety” now in that it isn’t a menu command sitting there one slot below titled snapshots and so easy to accidentally trigger.