@manifolded : For a few weeks I’ve sought to snapshot my whole Draft folder and I’ve finally discovered how, with CMD-5. But now I’m wondering why this is not more prominently place. Is there a reason this is to be avoided?
I’ve written a little bit on this matter in the past, and the main issue I have with the notion is that it seems a bit wasteful and noisy to me, to snapshot everything, regardless of whether or not it is going to be (or has been, depending on how you use the tool) edited.
But to put a bit of a disclaimer to it, I’m coming at this from the frame of mind of one who presses Scrivener’s outlining capacties to the limit—sometimes paragraph level outline nodes, and rarely chunks of text so long I have to scroll the editor.
Where that is salient to the topic at hand is that my edits are far more surgical than someone who has 15 massive chapter-length documents. Every time they change a sentence somewhere, the entire chapter has to be snapshot—whereas with the way I work, 99% of the chapter’s content in the binder isn’t being touched, so to snapshot the several dozen binder items around the one with the two or three paragraphs I actually edited is just noise that makes it harder for me to find the snapshots that actually matter.
Now amplify that problem to the entire draft, and it makes even less sense to do this.
So all right, maybe one who uses Scrivener more like File Explorer with a folder of .docx file might conceivably actually edit the entire list of times in the Draft folder in a revision pass. All right, why not then? Go ahead. There is probably a pretty decent sized area between extremes where it might be conceivably useful to blanket snapshot everything, but I would say the tendency would be toward waste rather than efficiency, and particularly if we wish to encourage Scrivener’s design intent of being an outliner-based writing tool rather than a file-based document manager. We’re competing with our own design if we promote stuff that really only works well with the latter.
In most cases, my mind would wonder whether or not File ▸ Back Up ▸ Back Up To... is not the right tool for the job, even if a full-draft snapshot actually would be used with little waste. If all we want is to preserve how things were at a certain point, before a large revision, why not actually do that, instead of making our core project larger and really only capturing the textual state rather than the meta-state of the outline (notes, synopsis, label flags, etc.).
So with all of that said, maybe you can see why this isn’t a tool that is flashing itself in your face when you click on the Draft folder or something. It was always designed to be a kind of use-as-needed “save as” tool for individual chunks of text. The concession to take more than one at a time upon a selection is not meant to be an invitation to routinely spam the entire project—so naturally we’re not going to make that more prominent. If you get use out of doing that, great, it is possible to use it responsibly and effectively, but it’s not something we want to encourage because it would be very easy to abuse it without understanding the implications.
@GoalieDad : Is there a way to easily assess the size of snapshots in a windows project, do not have some of mac options.
I don’t think I understand the query, as checking the size of a folder in your file manager would not require “mac options”.