I’m using with great pleasure a service called Dropbox, that syncs documents between the Macs we work on.
It would be great if Scrivener would share the same informations between my iMac and MacBook…
This has been discussed in gruesome detail several times. Just search the forums for dropbox.
Why can’t you just put your Scrivener document into Dropbox?
Best,
Keith
Are you wishing that Scrivener shared preferences, templates, compile methods, and so forth? If so, I don’t recommend sharing the preference file itself between computers, unless they are both set up identically (same user name and all), disregarding that could lead to oddities. If you want to share preferences, use the drop-down menu in the preferences window to save out the core preferences to a file which you can then place into your DropBox folder.
Sharing the Application Support folder, on the other hand, is not a bad idea, and it is something I do. The best way to do this with DropBox is to get a little geeky with it. I’d make a folder in DropBox called “Library”, and then you’ll need to follow these steps carefully:
Open Terminal.app (found in the Utilities folder) and copy and paste this code:
ln -s ~/Library/Application Support/Scrivener ~/Dropbox/Library/ScrivenerThis will create a link between your support folder and Dropbox. Your script modes, saved compile settings, templates, layouts, and other paraphernalia will be kept synchronised. In the future this will also keep automated backups synched as well, but that feature hasn’t been implemented yet.
You’ll want to be careful to keep your eye on the Dropbox icon and make sure that it is always inactive before you shut down the computer. This should be done anyway, but once you start sharing application resources it’s best to be extra prudent and avoid partial transfers.
If you want to keep projects up to date, please read these two articles in the FAQ.
It looks like (despite Keith’s post), storing (as opposed to backing up zipped) Scrivener projects on Dropbox still isn’t recommended, as far as I can see because of resource fork issues. I understand Dropbox may eventually support resource forks, but as Apple seem to be consistently if slowly moving away from them anyway, is there any chance Scrivener could wean itself off the use of res forks in a future version?
The issue, as I understand it, is not one of resource forks; it is that a Scrivener project is a package, consisting possibly of hundreds potentially even of thousands of files, and not one single large file. This means that the risk of the all important project management files, like the binder-strings file, getting out of sync with the data files is — as I found myself — too high when it comes to relying on the cloud. That is why it is recommended that you zip the project first, as that turns it into a single, flat file. I’m sure that is what Keith was actually thinking of in his last post. Even then you need to be sure that the zipped file has finished uploading to DropBox or iDisk before you exit Scrivener or turn your computer off.
Mark
Yes, I should have been more clear - zipping up projects is the best route for storing them on Dropbox.
And as xiamese says, this has nothing to do with resource forks - Scrivener doesn’t use them. Scrivener uses the well-established package format; that is, it is really just a folder of files that looks like a single file in the Finder.
That said, there shouldn’t be too much of a problem storing a Scrivener project on Dropbox even if it is unzipped, so long as you are careful about making backups regularly just in case. Dropbox, after all, stores the file on your local hard disk and only uploads a copy, which then downloads to other computers connected to your Dropbox account. The thing to be careful of is that you don’t open the same project on two computers at once, so that one computer is updating a project that is being synced to the cloud then back to another computer with Scrivener still open. Scrivener gives you a warning when you open a project that may possibly be open on another computer, though, so if you see that warning, make sure that the project couldn’t possibly be open on another machine before continuing (the warning can also appear if a project hasn’t been closed properly, for instance if there has been a crash).
Likewise, be careful not to open a project until it has fully sync’ed from Dropbox.
Best,
Keith
Thanks for the clarification. Does that mean that the Dropbox help page is wrong?
If the risk is just sync then I might risk storing unzipped files (with backups elsewhere, of course of course).
EDIT: moved to Mac tech support…