due to my folder structure and workflow, having all projects reside in only one Scrivener Dropbox folder doesn’t work for me. For my active projects, I’d like to use my regular deeply nested folder structure stretched over my local iMac hard drive. Projects for school are in completely different folders than projects for creative writing. If I work with Scrivener macOS, I want to launch the projects from their original places. On the other hand, of course, I want to be able to work on them on Scrivener iOS, linked to a single Dropbox folder,
I use Econ ChronoSync for all my backups and syncing between local and cloud drives. Would it make sense (and avoid file chaos and corruption) if I synced my projects from their orIginal place into the Dropbox folder? As soon as I change something locally, it’s pushed (and overwrites) the project copy on Dropbox. When I launch Scrivener iOS, it syncs the recent version of the project. Changes made there are synced back to the local hard drive folders by ChronoSybc as soon as I boot the computer.
I’ve used Chronosync since 2006 or so for various synchronization tasks, but I’m not sure it’s the best tool for the task in this case. The issue I see here is that you’d need to create a separate Chronosync document for each project, between the “original place” and the Dropbox folder. I suppose you could stick them all in a Chronosync container, but it seems like a lot of potential maintenance, & adds a second point of vulnerability in terms of sync issues. (You’d also get double hits in Spotlight for the original and the Dropbox copy, but that’s less of an issue and can be remedied).
What I’ve been doing (for all of a few days) is to create symlinks for the Scrivener for Mac projects so that the actual files are stored in the Dropbox folder and the original locations are symlinked to those files. The advantage of this is that there’s no second synchronization – the underlying UNIX filesystem handles everything. You still need to create the symlink once but then you can forget about it (it’ll show up as an alias in the Finder, though the underlying technology is different from Finder aliases).
There’s a nice overview here: gigaom.com/2011/04/27/how-to-cr … -on-a-mac/ . If you’re not familiar with symlinks I’d definitely practice with some temporary text files until you’ve got the commands down.
Does the ChronoSync take place before, after, or during the Dropbox folder update from the cloud? Any situation in which the local working copy does not match the Dropbox copy is potentially hazardous to your data.
Also, a common cause of problems with cloud services is inability of the service to keep up with Scrivener’s frequent saves. I don’t have experience with ChronoSync specifically, but inserting another data transfer step into the desktop -> Dropbox pipeline seems potentially hazardous.