Yes, I am aware. I thought Saun was talking about 3rd party software to make custom backups/snapshots outside of the software.
Are you saying you can use 3rd party software to make bespoke snapshots within Scrivener?
You’re over-complicating matters! I’d just stick to the ‘KISS’ principle:
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Use the backup option within Scrivener to create backup files (auto-zipped if you want). Put these wherever you think is safest.
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Use the snapshot features in Scrivener to make snapshots within Scrivener. Compare these within Scrivener.
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Use the Export/Import feature in Scrivener to export individual parts of your project to any external editor that does not have a native integration. Edit the file. Import it back into Scrivener.
Unless that is something you do once or twice a month at most, I’d adjust that to using the external folder sync tool, which was built precisely for make doing that an automatic affair (§14.3, Synchronised Folders).
- Open the the project, stuff you edited elsewhere syncs right into to the original slots in the binder.
- Close the project and the file system is updated with your edits.
- Optionally: run “sync now” throughout the day when switching devices.
Depending on how you use the binder, that can save you a lot of pain. Import/export item replacement strategies become untenable once you start making even moderate use of the Inspector. At the least, you would have to restore index card and notes data, and maybe compile settings, but what about the stuff we’re on topic here in this thread for, the snapshots? External folder sync actually uses snapshots to build a history of offline edits—import/export cycles lose all snapshots at each iteration (or at least break the chain into multiple items scattered throughout the binder).
One caveat (maybe this is a bug) is if you sync as .txt and make edits, you lose all formatting and comments. If you sync as .rtf and edit in Word, comments are turned into what looks like inline annotations once you sync again to get it back into Scrivener.
Yeah, that’s exactly what they are. Here’s an example:
Scrivener’s snapshots work quite well though, so I’m not sure there’s much benefit for most people to using git in addition to that. I use it because it’s automatic and I don’t like taking a bunch of snapshots. It’s also easier to see a history of changes.
On the first point, if the entire document is losing formatting because you edited one word in a text editor, that is a bug (or a missing implementation); it should only be swapping out the lines that change. Otherwise, you kind of have to expect the edited text to lose formatting when working on the content as .txt.
As for comments with TXT, you should use inline annotations and make sure the option to round-trip these to brackets is enabled, in the Sharing: Sync pane.
On the second point, looks like there aren’t options for that yet. It’s a simple matter to switch annotation style with the Edit ▸ Transformations ▸ submenu though, and overall I’d consider that a small price to pay for avoiding having to completely rebuild a dozen binder items every day—but again it’s going to depend on how much of Scrivener’s feature set you use. If mainly type into the editor and click on things in the binder, swapping out whole chunks of the outline isn’t too big of a deal.
But I fear we’ve digressed quite a bit from the original topic. 
It’s probably not your cup of tea then, but for the sake of anyone looking to take the manual labour out of snapshots, check out the setting in the General: Saving tab. It’s still something you have to remember to do, but Ctrl+S can be set up to automatically snapshot all modified items throughout the session. These can be routinely cleaned up with the Snapshots Manager feature.
I’m not following the point of yours and Shaun’s workflow tbh. Why would you want to export part of your Scriv doc, edit in another editor, then reimport? There will be niche reason, no doubt, but for a general workflow? Seems a bit redundant to me.
I just want to be able to have a realtime comparison mode that I can use to re-write with - so a side by side comparison in equal sized editors, preferably linked with scrolling (this has yet to be done in other softwares and could give Scriv a nice edge).
Thanks for the reply, but this is a bit over my head.
Sorry, I’m not sure which part of that you’re looking for elaboration on. The first part was a response to someone else, who was noting some limitations with a specific feature we were discussing.
As for the latter point, which may be of interest to you, if you go to File ▸ Options… and click on the “Saving” tab, you’ll find a setting to Take snapshots of changed text documents on manual save. When this is turned on, whenever you hit the traditional Ctrl+S shortcut, the program will automatically go through every section you’ve worked on since the last time you saved, and create snapshots for you.
That way, you don’t have to remember to use the feature, but automation such as this does come at the cost of clutter. The feature will go from being a tool that records when you feel an edit is significant to refer back from in the future, to flooding the list with versions you may have to pick through before finding the right one. These are the pros and cons.
Two quick comments:
- When you say “Settings…” you really mean “Options…”
- Where are these snapshots saved on the file system?
[list=A][*]Same location as the backups themselves? - Is the location configurable?
[/*:m][/list:o]
Quite right, I fixed the original post, thanks!
You wouldn’t ordinarily need to access them directly, and would instead use the UI (much like you wouldn’t ordinarily access the “synopsis.txt” file that stores the index card text for an item). But if you really need to find them for emergency recovery purposes or something, they are located within the “Snapshots” subdirectory for each project that has any.
Yes, Settings is the Mac nomenclature, Options is the Windows nomeclature.
Snapshots are considered part of the project, so they are saved within each project’s folder structure. Each snapshot file is a point-in-time copy of a single document within the project. They’re meant to allow you to have multiple versions of a document within the same project, not as some sort of backup structure outside of the project.
So, if you make a full project backup each day, that backup will contain all of the snapshots that existed in the project at the time that you created the backup.
If you do a Save As and fork a copy of your project, that forked copy will contain all the snapshots that existed in your project at the time you performed the Save As.
Thus you don’t have to take any special care to manage your snapshots; they are part of your project structure and will even sync between computers and Scrivener platforms if you are doing so. Using the Snapshot Manager is the best way to interact with the snapshots in your project.
Thanks, Devin. This is all good to know.
As I’m new to snapshots, I’m playing around a bit and I believe it will prove very useful (many times over given my propensity to introduce unintended edits.)
And I see that, in the inspector, the Snapshots icon has a little dot added to it if there are snapshots for the document, which is useful.
So (rhetorical question): why haven’t I had this turned on?
Not everything’s perfect, though. (When’s that ever the case?)
So “powers that be” (designers and developers), some examples:
For instance, when I’m inspecting a snapshot (in the inspector, of course) I wish the snapshot displayed during compare retained/displayed the formatting as it was actually saved (in my case, headings, numbered lists, etc.) Still, I’ll take it as is and just keep wishing.
I’ve also tried right-clicking on a snapshot in the Inspector and selecting the “View on Copyholder” and find that’s pretty cool, but if I scroll to the bottom of both the current version and the snapshot the last line of the current version is half-way up my window (exactly where it would be if I was typing on that line—I have typewriter scrolling on), but the snapshot only scrolls to the last line, but at the bottom of the screen. It would be nice—from the perspective of a side-by-side comparison—if it could also be scrolled up that far as well, and I hope that becomes a thing at some point.
Publishing isn’t a “niche reason”. Getting a book published involves external (human ) editing. It’s highly unlikely they’ll be using Scrivener and logging into any synced folders (as suggested by AmberV elsewhere in this thread). They’ll want MS Word formatted documents with track changes / versioning switched on and you’ll be importing / exporting these docs to sync with your ‘master’ project file. Complete PITA I know, but that’s the tech dinosaur embedded within traditional publishing for you.
That’s best described as a sensible technical limitation. Pretty much every tool out there that is designed to compare two texts together does so as pure text. There are very few tools that work around the underlying RTF codes that you cannot see, and I don’t think any of those are capable of being embedded into other software. Given that many shifts in these codes would be utterly inconsequential to a human, and given how difficult it would be to show a difference between two invisibly different things, or to program “awareness” into what is or isn’t consequential, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to create one from scratch either (especially given the difficulty of doing so).
That’s a very good point. The feature was initially designed for mobile users to take their work on the go, but it very quickly made itself obvious as a useful tool for collaboration with non-Scrivener users, too.
It may not be the most well-known of features, but it probably could do with being more well-known, for that simple use alone.
Actually, I have started using it for collaboration purposes, even though I’m a dedicated Scrivener user. The thing is, currently, we’re working to a fairly short deadline and so she is working on the project until late in the evening. Even though we are 8 hours apart, this means I am only able to access the project round about when we’re preparing dinner, and after dinner and spending time with the better half, I’m too tired to be able to do much, so I’m lagging behind.
So I’ve started using External Folder Sync on documents that she has finished the first draft of, using a label to set up a search collection that Syncs. In that way, it is invisible to her unless she wishes to investigate, but during the day I can work on the documents (translations from Chinese to English) in Nisus Writer Pro—footnotes, comments and text colours all transfer back and forwards without problem. That said, even though I love NWP as a word processor, it is still far a far less comfortable working environment than doing it directly in the project using Scrivener!
Mark
I edit … words left out!
I know Windows users can’t use the mobile vers (Windows mobile app slated for future), but can Windows users use this secondary functionality of collaborating via the sync?
Firstly, Windows users can use the iOS version if they please. The desktop version has been capable of loading mobile changes and projects from day one. Secondly, if I read you correctly, there are no plans to ever make a Windows mobile version. I’m not even sure what that means these days, I was under the impression they gave up on having a mobile platform years ago, but I’ll be the first to admit I have very little interest in mobile anything—I could be clueless. Whatever the case, we never indicated that was a possibility or something we were interested in.
That said: folder sync has nothing to do with any of that. The mobile version works on the original project itself, and has access to most of its internal data and organisation. You can edit the corkboard, set labels, etc. It’s a “mini Scrivener”, not a text editor that edits a small folder full of files like folder sync produces.
So for that, anyone can use folder sync however they find it applicable to do so, no matter if they use WordStar on DOS, an IRIS workstation, Palm Pilots, Macs or AlphaSmarts. Whether by sharing the folder with a collaborator and having them make edits to the files, or syncing it to your phone and editing the files with a text editor, or to scriptwriting program that can edit Fountain files, it doesn’t take much to support the technology of file editing.
Part of what makes it such an adaptable and useful feature is how simple it works on the user side. It’s nothing more than a folder with some text files in it. You can do all kinds of stuff with that idea.
Windows Mobile is dead. There is Windows on ARM that looks interesting for smaller tablets, but that would require a recompile to the Windows for ARM platform (assuming Qt doesn’t take care of compiling to multiple platforms for you already). The new Surface phone is just Android under the hood.
Sorry, I meant Android app version, able to sync with Windows desktop Scriv. (I always put Windows and Android together).