Hi. I’m upgrading my PC next week. I figured since I had a rare moment of foresight, I’d ask here if there is anything I need to do to prepare Scrivener for a smooth transition to my new system and to keep my projects secure so I can hit the ground running?
I’ve manually backed up my project to my hard drive, my google drive, and my dropbox. I even compiled a PDF and sent it to my husband JUST in case the worse happens and I need to copy it back into scrivener line by line. (Just to clarify, I don’t doubt Scrivener, I’ve just been hurt by other programs in the past)
Any Life Pro Tips from people or developers who care to share? Things I should keep in mind?
Save your settings from the options panel and do a backup of this file as well.
Save all your customs compile formats and back those files up.
Preferably Zip your backup files before uploading them to your cloud and/or copying them to an external disk. (To avoid file corruption.)
You could compile your draft to a format other than PDF – RTF or DOCX for e.g. – so that in case of a catastrophe, at least you won’t have to retype everything, but rather just paste back the whole thing at once in a new Scrivener project.
We have an article on adding a new Windows computer here. It covers things like saving your program settings, moving your files, moving your backups, etc. I’d recommend giving it a once-over.
Make sure you have your license key handy for installing Scrivener on your new computer. If you don’t have it saved in a note, look back through your email or try the lost license recovery system. If that doesn’t pull it up, email support.
If you bought your license before March 2021, your license is for Scrivener 1. Since you’re doing a fresh install anyway, it’s an easy time to upgrade to Scrivener 3. If you want to stick with Scrivener 1, you can find that download link here. You won’t be able to activate Scrivener 3 with your Scrivener 1 license key.
If possible, keep your old PC around for a while, in the event something was missed.
After everything’s moved and Scrivener installed on the new PC, open every project, particularly older ones, to confirm that your binder looks intact and that your text has survived the transition.
Agree with all of above and would back up to Dropbox before upgrade and do two backups to USB drive of projects as zip file . Upgrading to windows 11 theoretically will do nothing to scrivener or files, but best to be safe.
Thank you for this! Unfortunately, I custom build my PC’s (I’m a professional artist with a high demand for power! lol) so keeping my ‘old one’ isn’t really an option . Although, I could take a few screen shots … like, actual screen shots, not the Scrivener ones. My project is over 200k words so it would be nice to have something to reference so I could ensure everything made the transfer. Great idea!
As for the other files – options and custom compile formats -, you have to do it manually afterwards. Scrivener doesn’t Zip those.
The best is to wrap them all up in a single folder somewhere on your computer, and then Zip that one folder. Less annoying than doing them all one by one, + everything is to be found in one place/folder once you are ready to migrate to your upgraded computer.
If you know how to build your own PC, I’m guessing you also know how to back up the entire disk to an external drive. I’d do that, and keep the external drive handy until you’re sure everything has migrated successfully.
This is the plan lol. But just in case, since my hardware is kind of old, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing anything else. I know once all my new parts get in I’ll be so happy that I’ll forget to do a few things that’ll cause me headaches later. I didn’t want the added stress of thinking I’ve lost my story on top of all that. Some of the post on here break my heart when they mention they didn’t backup their project properly. I don’t want that to be me, no offense.
When I had a new custom built pc bought 1 year ago, I took the hard drives that were not the c drive from my old pc and added on via additional SATA (i believe the right connector) connectors and add as additional drives thus retaining all the old data as another back up mechanism and now use those to store important but seldom accessed data keeping more relevant info on my two ssd drives.
. Although, I could take a few screen shots … like, actual screen shots, not the Scrivener ones. My project is over 200k words so it would be nice to have something to reference so I could ensure everything made the transfer. Great idea!
