There should be no substantial differences between platforms in this matter. Both versions act that same, with a 2-second idle for saving and only saving those files that have changed. The important thing to understand about pausing is that all it does is tell your computer to stop interacting with the Dropbox server for a while. In a way, it is like going offline. It will not solve collisions problems. It will not make it so that you can edit the project while someone else is. On the surface it may seem so, because you and they will no longer get the warning, but as soon as you turn syncing back on, Dropbox would try to reconcile the differences you’ve made with the differences they made—and it having no knowledge of how Scrivener works, will be forced to make a huge mess of things with duplicated control and data files. It would be a very bad idea to work this way. You can use pausing, but like I said, I would highly recommend in a collaborative environment that you load the project first and then pause. That way the user.lock file is created on the server and that lets everyone else know that someone is editing the file and to stay out. Then when you are done you can close the project and resume Dropbox. All of your changes will be uploaded, and the user.lock file will be removed.
For stuff that is just your personal projects, it would indeed probably be better to pause before opening, but that’s not a big deal either way. Nothing much gets changed when opening the project. So in your case I would stick with pausing right after opening and letting that user.lock file go up, because that is the habit you want to form in your collaborative project.
So to recap: Pausing is not a solution to multiple simultaneous edits. All it does is defer corruption until later. Pausing is only a solution to the auto-save interval problem, where edits are flying up to the server so fast. It makes live editing a little safer and means you don’t have to mess with the auto-save counter, reducing its effectiveness, that’s all. You will still need to work out a rota so everyone has a time to work on the project, or just have a good system of communication with an instant messenger or something.
Thank you very much for clarifying these points. This is very important stuff to know and should find it’s way in the maual imho.
As I work on diffferent computers but not parallel I didn’t think of the lock.
Maybe something like git or svn could be helpful for teamworking? Didn’t try it though for scrivener. assembla.com is a nice, private and free service to try out. I use it for collaborative work on my evening school java/android-project. With tortoise (windows svn) checking out and comitting is easy enough. Don’t know what tool exists for Mac though.
“File>Synch>with External Folder” is NOT the way to share the same project between two machines (say a laptop and a desktop) so do NOT use this feature for this purpose.
Instead, I am to just save my file itself to the Dropbox folder “File>Save>Select Dropbox as directory”
and then go to my other machine, Open Scrivener, Open File>Select Dropbox and open the file from there?
The project is closed on the first machine before you open it on the second.
The project is also fully sync-ed to Dropbox from the first machine before you turn the machine off, and fully sync-ed from Dropbox to the second machine before you open the project. (You can tell when sync-ing is over because the green tick on your Dropbox icon stops vibrating.)
When you have finished working on either machine, you back-up your project locally to the hard disk.
Keith’s post, the first in this thread, provides further details.
I would like to ask a question - I have looked in the manual and this thread and haven’t seen it covered, but apologies if I have missed something.
I use Scrivener for Mac on my home computer and Scrivener for Windows on my netbook. I save my .scriv file to my Dropbox folder and follow the guidelines on the first post of the thread. I have been doing this for a while now and it all works very well.
I would like to use the Sync with External Folder feature to be able to view and edit my work on my iPad from time to time. I think this would be straightforward if I only used Scrivener for Mac - my question is whether also using the Windows version as described above will cause any problems. I think I saw that the feature isn’t available for Windows as yet, but will this be a problem provided I use the Mac version for syncing? For instance, what would happen if I synced to folder, did a bit of editing on Windows (and allowed my DB .scriv file to sync), then did some editing on my iPad, then opened the Mac version (after allowing DB to sync first of course!)? I would get a message saying that the external folder version had changed but would it be a problem if I accepted the option to update?
If you want to play it safe, you could always sync with the external folder before and after using Windows, from the Mac, but theoretically what you describe should be no different than syncing out, doing some editing on the iPad, then coming back later and doing some more editing on the Mac without syncing, and then syncing later on. Going to Windows basically simulates a non-synced continuous session on the Mac, and the synchronisation code is designed to be resilient (or at the least, gentle) to that, especially with its default settings of snapshotting changed items. If something goes wrong, you can always check out the last or second-to-last snapshot and recover the problem either with copy and paste out of the snapshot or a bulk roll-back. That’s what the special sync collection after syncing is for, so you can go through and audit the changes. The comparison feature in the snapshot pane will help you with that.
Not sure what I’m doing wrong. I’ve been using Scrivener on my Mac for aaaaages and would now like to use it on a PC as well (loaner laptop for work, ugh!). But I can’t seem to open any of my .scriv files saved in Dropbox. I double click to open, Scrivener pops up, reminds me that it’s the trial version and then… nothing.
Could it be because I’m using the trial version?? Or do I have to save the .scriv on my Mac in some different way first?
This may have been posted already in the forum and perhaps in this thread but I definitely did not manage to find the relevant info. Why is it not possible for Scrivener to sync PDF files in the Research section of a project in the Dropbox folder?
It’d be great to access those files with Notebooks in iOS.
I think this is a question about external folder sync, isn’t it? If so, that’s a different topic - this post is about saving projects on Dropbox. External folder sync is for text-files only.
All the best,
Keith
My mistake! I guess I hadn’t realized that there is a difference. Is there a way of using Notebooks for iOS such that I can access with it all files in the Research section of a Scrivener project (incuding PDFS)? what I found both here and in the Notebooks forums is related to external folder syncing, which, as you say, allows only text-file syncing.
No, there’s no way to do that, sorry. External folder syncing is text-only. Because Scrivener supports any number of media file formats, and users have projects that can be in the gigabytes, it could lead to all sorts of problems allowing the sync of all data, so it’s text-only, and at one-level deep only (that is, all draft files are synced to a “Draft” folder, and all other files are synced to a “Notes” folder). This is because there is no way of syncing a file browser hierarchy with Scrivener’s binder. We’ll have much more control over that in our own iOS app, of course, which will allow for PDF files and work with structure.
Meanwhile, I presume your PDF files are not changing all of the time. If all you want to do is have access to them, I’d recommend exporting them from the project to Dropbox somewhere (not in the folder sync area) so you can load and access them in iOS. If they are changing a lot (annotations etc.) then you’d have to manually keep those up to date by importing them back in. Right now this is easier if you stick to using the computer to annotate the PDFs as you can open them straight out of the project, work on them, and save them back in.
I am currently using one or the other strategy, in different projects. They are both manageable, just not ideal. Hopefully Scrivener for iOS will make it ideal
Hello. I’m new here and decided to check out the advice for Dropbox. I see that they advise us not to sync with an external folder or things will go ka-boom. Reading this thread has made me worry about how I’m syncing things. I’m not sure if what I’m doing is set up properly, and honestly, I’m not sure I’m doing this right. So, I guess what I’m asking for is a better way to do the following:
Basically, my friend and I are collaborating on a writing project together. She has a PC and I have a Mac. She did install Scrivener for PC but she is really attached to Word.
I also like to edit on-the-go so I’ve set my Scrivener project to sync with Dropbox. It exports my files as plain text. I have edited the text files (via Dropbox) on various macs, my iPhone (via DropText), and my friend has edited the files via Editpad Lite on her PC. When I open Scrivener, it syncs with Dropbox and so far I haven’t had any issues. (Yes, I have it do a Snapshot before it syncs, just in case.)
I do intend on going between two macs which have Scrivener installed - is it a bad idea to have two installs of Scrivener sync to the same external project?? What about the PC version?
Have I made this more complicated than it needs to be? Am I missing something vital? Is my data going to go corrupt?
I have never done anything like that (that is, collaborating on a project or using multiple machines). I tend to use Scrivener-Dropbox for first drafts only, using my MBP and iPad (sometimes even iPhone). When I open the project to collaborators, we (sadly) move to word processors, mostly Word (sadly, again). However, my experience with syncing with external folders in DropBox has been so far flawless. Never lost anything. Not a glitch.
The folder sync feature is designed for making it easy to edit pieces of a Scrivener project with other programs. So it will work fine with the person who you are working with that uses Word. (Windows version doesn’t have this feature anyway, yet). That’s what it is designed for. When they edit the RTF files, Scrivener will handle syncing them in. I recommend installing Growl so you can better see when they get edited. It posts notices when files change on Dropbox.
But yes, the whole thrust of the warning not to use folder sync to try and sync two projects together is what you are talking about. Hooking up two projects to the same folder is trying to use folder sync to keep two projects synced. Don’t do that; the software won’t even let you, but don’t try to get around that. It’s there for your protection.
If you want to use more than one computer and do not want to transfer your project between computers using traditional media to do so or file sharing, then it’s best to just put the whole project on Dropbox, and read up in the user manual (§13.6) on how to avoid issues when doing this. You have to be more careful when you put a complicated file format on a complicated mechanism like Dropbox.
I recently started using Scrivener. Before I created my first project, I created a new subfolder called “Scrivener Projects” inside my ~/Documents folder. I have only one project in the “Scrivener Projects” subfolder. I want to move everything to Dropbox, so that I can use Scrivener on two computers. Is there more to it than simply moving the entire “Scrivener Projects” subfolder from ~/Documents to ~/Dropbox?
I understand the need not to have a project open on two computers at the same time, making sure that Dropbox syncs finish first, etc. I am asking only about moving an existing project (including non-text content) into Dropbox.
Am I correct that syncing to an “external” folder is something completely different from using Dropbox as the location for storing my projects “internally”? I am using automatic backups, but as far as I know I have not set up syncing to an external folder.
Yes, moving the folder is all you need to do; just be sure you don’t have the project open in Scrivener when you move it. Once you’ve moved it to Dropbox and everything has synced, you’ll be able to open it on either computer via the File > Open menu in Scrivener or by double-clicking the .scriv file. (Once you’ve done that once, it’ll show up in the Recent Projects menu or may open by default when you launch Scrivener if you have that preference set; you’ll just need to open it the long way once since you’ve changed the original file path.)
The Sync with External Folder feature is entirely different, as you assume, and it’s something you’d need to go through a few steps to set up, so you won’t have done it unintentionally. This feature enables you to work on specific documents from your project in another word processor–e.g. you might sync with an external folder so you can collaborate with someone using Word or so that you can access your documents on your iPad. It’s not a way to keep an entire project in sync over multiple machines and doesn’t use Scrivener on both ends. By comparison, saving your project in Dropbox allows the entire project bundle (i.e. the .scriv package) to sync to your various computers, so you can open it in Scrivener on any of your machines and work on it just as you’d normally do (with the given caveats of ensuring it’s only open on one computer at a time, you allow sufficient time to sync, etc.) and Dropbox will automatically keep the project up-to-date on each computer.
Don’t do that; the software won’t even let you, but don’t try to get around that. It’s there for your protection.