Fantastic, Amber! I shall continue to heed the Golden Rules…
Thanks for taking the time to explain.
I’m confused. Despite the big warning in the first post, not to use External sync to save to Dropbox, many users seem to do so anyway?
The other part I don’t get is how to get a file from DB onto another Mac. Finding the right version on DB, dragging it to the desktop, then unzipping it, (as described by other users) seems not that straightforward and prone to accidentily opening a wrong version. Why not sync the project from DB directly into Scrivener, work on it, and then sync it back to DB? What am I missing here?
Will iCloud come to the rescue when it is released in a couple of weeks?
There’s no prohibition against this, but it’s main purpose is not to sync from Scrivener on one machine to Scrivener on another machine, but to sync between Scrivener and iPad apps like “Index Card” and “Plain Text”, which can’t read a Scrivener bundle, but can access your dropbox folders.
Being especially careful to follow the instructions in the first post of this thread, simply open the project directly from your dropbox folder.
Not likely. iCloud seems to be designed for syncing individual files, like a Pages or Word document, not a complicated bundle of files like Scrivener’s.
So just to make sure I understand, just plain open and save from/to my DB folder on both Macs?
Yes. Never at the same time, of course (see page one of this discussion)*, but it’s that simple. I do it between my beta Windows Scrivener and my Mac’s Scrivener projects frequently.
*I’m sure you’re taking that into account, but I want to make absolutely sure that Keith’s advice on the first post is heeded by anyone reading this far back in the conversation.
Edit: wasn’t paying attention, could have sworn that Ioa had started the thread, not Keith. Edited for accuracy.
You mean this post: Working off of network drives (MobileMe, thumb drives...) ?
There it says at the bottom:
Confused again…
No, I meant page one of this thread. Scroll down to the bottom or the top of this page, and look for “xx posts Page 1 of y 1 2 3 4 …”, and click on the 1. that will take you to the first page of this discussion, where the instructions I’m referring to are.
I mistakenly thought that Ioa (not Keith) had started THIS thread. Sorry about that.
If you are careful, you can ignore the advice you quoted and use Keith’s instructions instead.
Edit: Though it feels wasteful to repeat Keith’s words at the top of this thread, you should read it (and everything that follows in that initial post:
"Using Scrivener with Dropbox
Postby KB on Sun Feb 13, 2011 12:11 pm
Hello,
Our support thread on “Working off of network drives” has understandably left many users concerned about using Scrivener with Dropbox. However, the problems with storing .scriv files on Dropbox have been somewhat overstated, mainly because we want to ensure users know that no syncing method is 100% safe. So, here are some guidelines on using Scrivener with Dropbox that should keep you out of trouble."
To add to Robert’s wise advice above – bear in mind two things: the dates on the posts and your own personal appetite for risk. The post from Ioa/AmberV that you’re referring to predates the post from Keith that begins this thread by – I think – two years. In those two years, I guess people became more comfortable about putting their Scrivener project directly into their DropBox folder, rather than a zipped backup.
But in Keith’s post, notice not only his specific caveats but also his warning that no syncing is ever going to be 100% safe. And this warning is what relates to your appetite for risk. I have a low appetite for risk with any writing that might earn or lose me money, so I follow the Ioa/AmberV advice for this type of writing and only ever put zipped back-ups into my DropBox; the original project folder remains in “Documents” on my machine. Of course that’s not 100% safe either, but obviously that’s slightly safer than putting the project folder directly into DropBox. If I were writing purely for fun and personal enjoyment, I would probably be more relaxed about using the method Keith outlines.
Thanks again guys, I get it now 
I think the confusion for me also comes from the naming of the menu items: External Sync vs BackUp vs Open/Save.
Not sure why syncing with Dropbox should be construed as risky. Even if things go wrong, they can be fixed. First, you always have your backups. Second, you can always roll back to before syncing. It happened to me last night (and obviously it was my fault, I should have known better). I just rolled back to before syncing.
Using DB (carefully) to sync between two Macs, I note that if I save the project to the DB folder, when I reopen it (whether on the system used to create the project, or the system I am syncing with), the coloured icons and saved searches generated using metadata no longer show in the Binder. Otherwise, the project seems to be entirely intact (for example, the metadata used for the saved searches, and to colour the document icons, is preserved). Any ideas why this should be? It is a small inconvenience, but I have found the saved search facility particularly useful.
That information is saved in a file called “ui.plist” in the Settings folder within the .scriv package. Check in there and see if Dropbox created a conflicted version of this file. It might be you made those changes on the machine that generated the conflicted copy, and so Scrivener loads the one without those UI settings since it isn’t going to load the conflicted one.
Thanks. The problem was exactly as you described, with the ui.plist file marked as conflicted. Not sure how the conflict arose, however, as I was not aware of opening that file on a machine other than the one used to create the file in the first place.
HI there
I am trying to work on my book on both my Mac and my PC machines. At home my iMac is my main machine (except when I am in bed) and away from home my PC laptop is my main machine. I spend about equal time on them.
I have a folder I save to on dropbox and which I access from both computers, making sure that the book is only open on one machine at a time. However the Mac and PC versions of Scrivener do not seem completely compatible with each-other, as evidenced by weird things happening like all the quotation marks disappearing throughout my novel (Yes this happened last night when I opened my project on my PC).
What I would like to know is, is there some sort of compatibility mode I can save in on the Mac to make the Scrivener file 100% compatible with no issues to the PC version? I don’t want to just use external folder sync and Word on my PC, I paid for my Scrivener version on the Mac and I’m planning to pay for the PC version once Nano is over. Right now I’m only working on NanoWriMo but once that’s over I will be preparing a previous novel for publication and won’t be able to risk these sort of problems.
Thanks for your time! Love the program and couldn’t imagine using anything else now that I’m used to it.
Is there a ”best practices" workflow for co-authors who are working together on the same manuscript?
Don’t. Seriously, Scrivener is not a great tool for collaboration because of the risk of file corruption.
If you do choose to use it this way, all of the cautions about using Scrivener with Dropbox apply double with co-authors. In particular, you need to be absolutely positive that you don’t have two people working on the same project at the same time. That’s pretty much guaranteed to mangle your data.
Depending on the nature of the collaboration, one way to do it might be to assign “A” sections and “B” sections. Put all the A sections in one project under author A’s control, and the others in a completely separate project under B’s control. Don’t even give the other author access until you’re ready to merge them, and then switch to a tool like Google Docs.
Katherine
My dropbox sync works fine. But I have another problem. How do I turn on incremential syncing?
Adding all the PDFs and pictures to my Resources has bloated the scrivener file to several hundred megabytes which is fine on my local machine. But I can’t upload hundreds of megabytes over and over again to dropbox although I only added some more sentences which adds some bytes to the file but the Resources stay untouched.
Are you positive that is what happening? This description doesn’t match the way Scrivener and Dropbox typically work, which is why I ask. Ordinarily only those things which have been modified will be saved to the disk by Scrivener (if you have a 10gb project and change one synopsis card, it doesn’t take 5m writing 10gb to the disk, it just writes the .txt file for this card), and Dropbox only uses modification to determine what should be uploaded. If you are getting excessive, repeated uploads of the entire project, then perhaps your Dropbox installation is messed up. Maybe the caching index files are corrupt. I’d seek help on the Dropbox boards if the same files are continually uploading even if they haven’t changed.
Ok, I’ve checked all my settings. It turned out that the backup folder is the culprit.
Thanks for pointing me there.
I am grief-stricken. I have lost most of what I have written in Scrivener.
While it is possible to use Scrivener on files stored on Dropbox, do NOT use multiple computers to open Scrivener projects. I managed to corrupt my Scrivener projects by updating to the latest version on 2 laptops, and trying to reopen a project. First the program notified me that I would have to update the file and advised me that the saved file was possibly corrupt. Then it performed some kind of operation on the project files and informed me that the file could not be opened. One by one, I watched this happen to all my Scrivener projects. I have been careful to close all the projects before shutting down first Scrivener and then my computer. I have backed files up to scrivener zip files in another directory. Perhaps some of my writing is safe there.
Lesson? Install Scrivener on ONLY ONE MACHINE, and KEEP YOUR PROJECTS ON THAT MACHINE’S HARD DRIVE. You CANNOT replace writing that has been corrupted by trying to use Dropbox and multiple machines.