Hi Keith et al. I’m looking forward to the iOS app release this week, and would like to know before I configure syncing whether Dropbox is necessarily the only option for syncing between Mac OS and iOS? I understand the objections to iCloud, but have you tried/tested syncing via Dropbox alternatives, such as Tresorit, which I prefer to use when security is important—surely a consideration for many writers?
Only Dropbox is supported. If you don’t want to use Dropbox, you can move projects between devices by copying via iTunes.
iOS is not like the Mac or Windows. On the desktop, you download client software (such as the Dropbox app) that syncs all your files with the servers. There is no such facility on iOS. On iOS, to sync, an app has to use an API provided by a sync company such as Dropbox and write the developer has to write all their own sync code. So, the iOS version uses the Dropbox API - thus you will need to use Dropbox. It is not practicable for me to support multiple sync platforms, I’m afraid, so we have chosen the most popular and the one that is most stable on the desktop.
All the best,
Keith
Understood (I think—I’m writing a book not code!), and thanks for the quick reply. I use Dropbox too, so can live with this.
I have been using Tresorit for about a year, I had switched to it after Wuala died. I use it not to actually sync but to backup data from my sole Mac.
So nothing complicated, no possible sync conflicts, one might think. But still at one point Tresorit had messed up my main DEVONthink Pro data base. The maintenance routine spotted close to 50 orphaned files. Which means the index files and the actual files in the data base were not in sync anymore. Thanks to Time Machine I could jump back to the last intact version. And since then I just backup a zipped file of the data base every few days.
I am mentioning this here as a caveat. Better not wish for Tresorit as a sync service for Scrivener because it seems to have some problem with complex/package file formats.
Just wanted to chime in with a vote for syncing via Tresorit. I’ve been using Tresorit heavily for about 5 years to sync files between a number of Windows laptops, iphones, an ipad, and a couple of android tablets. I have never had any problems with the sync whatsoever.
I realize dropbox is way, way more popular. But like others, security is super important for me so I would love to see tresorit added. It would be great if there was a standard sync architecture for ios apps that all of these cloud services could just plug into.
That’s part of the problem – each app is sandboxed, so you can’t share data between them easily. BY DESIGN. Apple doesn’t want App A being able to directly exchange data with App B. Scrivener has to have a lot of sync-engine-specific code to support this scenario, it is not (and won’t ever be unless Apple fundamentally changes the security architecture of iOS) as simple as “use the sync folder” or “access a shared plug-in” like it would be on a desktop OS.
Having said that, there’s no point in going to all the engine-specific work and coding if the back-end sync engine isn’t reliable for the data format Scrivener uses. Pretty much, Dropbox is the only member of the set “can use on iOS” and “can use reliably without corrupting Scrivener data” – so Dropbox is it for an over the air sync solution.