Can someone tell me about the wisdom of placing/storing all of my writing jobs within one Scrivener project?
I manage six translation projects, three book editing projects, a number of blog articles, and more.
I would like to have all my work (and associated research) “collected” and “stored” in one Scrivener project, for ease of moving between these jobs. I did experiment with this, but became scared when the project file became huge.
Can someone identify any possible downside, any potential problems? Is this approach to using Scrivener wise?
If this has been answered already, please direct me to the conversation.
Thanks.
Nelson
File managing is one of the best feature in Scrivener. Yet, I never thought of having ALL my data in one single file. A conservative estimate of what would that mean (and I am considering only processed data that I need for writing) is between 30 to 50 Gb. However, your data may end up being much less than that. Also, I am not sure it really matters. After all, a .scriv file is just a container, isn’t it? It organizes a bunch of files. I guess we really need an opinion from the people writing the code. Does it matter, file size? And why?
Two issues to be aware of, that I can think of.
First, as far as I know - although I’m not an engineer - it’s a general principle of engineering that distributing your assets amongst several containers is less risky than putting them all into one. That could apply here.
Second and more practically, backing up a single very large container - you do back up regularly, don’t you? - will take longer - and possibly be more error-prone - than backing up a smaller one. I seem to remember that this was occasionally an issue in the past for users who had created very large .scriv ‘files’. As far as I know, such back-ups aren’t incremental. It’s all or nothing. I don’t know whether that’s still the case, but it seems likely.
For me, it seems ‘common-sensible’ to put everything in one container that’s closely-related, but no more. Other programmes, such as DevonThink, Together, and Eaglefiler, can successfully fulfil the role of ‘everything, anytime’ bucket, but that’s not Scrivener’s USP.
Another down-side to putting ALL of your work into one project is that it makes using keywords and searches for a given subset of your work difficult or just messy. Especially if there are silos of work that don’t have much (if any) overlap, you risk having too much to sift through for a smaller project.
Compiling output can also be a bit more cumbersome, since compile settings for one kind of work can be vastly different from another kind of work; you’ll quickly have to create and update various saved compile settings, always being careful to re-load the latest settings for your translation work when you transition back to it from doing blog entries.
My suggestion is that you keep one project for all your blogging, one for translation work, one project each for related book projects/series.
Why not simply start with a “kitchen sink project” as default entry point for everything that does not fit with an existing project? Nothing easier than, should one part of the binder tree grow large enough to justify its own project, to create one and drag it over there.
Thanks, everyone, for your response! You have indicated a few possible downsides, and identified possible cautions about putting all my writing jobs inside one Scrivener project, and using Scrivener as my filing cabinet.
I’m still curious to hear from someone who has developed Scrivener, or someone who may have tried this approach to data management. What is the risk of file corruption, for example? What are the rescue options available? Does a large (multi-GB) scriv. project slow things down, for loading, backup, etc.?
Over the years, I’ve accumulated a large number of PDFs, written a large number of magazine columns, etc. I’d like to have these at my fingertips within Scrivener, for obvious reasons. One fewer program to have open; the ability to search within Scrivener while writing within Scrivener; you get the idea.
I use a Macbook Air for all my work, and the “spotlight” feature grabs quite a few resources via keyword . . . but how convenient if I could do the same within Scrivener.
Anyway, once again, thanks to you who have taken the time to respond. Scrivener is a great product, and the Scrivener community is a helpful and friendly group!