Gah, Well I just found out the hard way that using a MobileMe box as my main box storage for Scrivener files and lost a couple of days worth of work. Nothing major, more annoying. I was thinking about not using MobileMe as my main folder yesterday. I should have gone with the urge.
I think that sync services are going to come on but I don’t that relying on them as the main folder for stuff is a good idea. It might take more seconds to copy over files to the sync folder but at least you know you’ve got a good copy on the machine you’ve last been using.
My files managed to corrupt somehow - probably due to the way they are packaged and not a single file. Not that I’m complaining more explaining.
Scrivener is a great piece of software - it’s user error this time!
How about using BACKUP PROJECT TO function to a directory you want “updated”, then on the other end you can download the most current zip, open it and get to work. Once done BACKUP PROJECT TO a directory that is updated/backed up and repeat the process down stream.
Works like a charm since its a “zipped” file (no corruption) and you are always using the most current file if you always use the zip files as your main files and use the .scr as working files.
After all the only thing this will do is take a little more time depending on file size and you can’t be in two places at once so…
Wock beat me to it but this is how I do it. I have backup to via zip and ::KnockOnWood:: have had zero issues. In fact, I prefer it this way so that I can control the backups. I do not want an auto back up as has been previously suggested.
Actually, I have found that “Backup Project to …” will always revert to the folder that it wrote to the previous time it was used. So, if you keep your active project on your internal hard disk, then do a first backup to a suitable folder on DropBox or MobileMe or whatever — like a “Scrivener” folder for instance — then each time you do a backup it will be put in that folder, and in the case of DropBox will automatically be uploaded and synced to every linked computer.
I am one who has suffered losses — not catastrophic, though — through trying to use DropBox as the location for active Scriv projects, and am resolved on taking that route from now on. Perhaps if there were an overall preference, or maybe a preference that could be set in each project as to where the backups go, that would remove one more issue … Now someone is going to tell me that there already is, over and above the defaulting to the last backup path used!
the other “problem” with backup up to zip is that you need to sync the whole file. This is horribly inefficient. Especially if you have one of those giant projects we hear about.
Maybe KB can be talked into a collaborative project where someone writes the sync and he tells us how he will indicate locked files. Maybe. Or maybe not.
I think I heard Keith mention somewhere at some time (my moonshine addled brain is a tad foggy) that in the next major upgrade (2.0) that he overhauled the preferences and I think he mentioned there was a “backup” preference that you could set the backup directory default and a few other neato things that Keith does.
Don’t quote me on that but I think 2.0 will have some beefed up backup preferences from what I think I thought I heard (or actually read since I heard nothing).
I would really love to work directly off of files saved to my iDisk as I find saving a backup to the idisk and then copying that backup to the local hard drive on the other end and uncompressing can get a bit convoluted. How about using the iWork 2009 trick of saving everything as glorified zip files. Would that work and/or be feasible?
The main problem with using zip (or any single-file format) with Scrivener is that currently it is very efficient about what it saves. Only the bits of the project that you touch are saved, so you can have a 100 mb project, change a single line, and only that one file with the line gets saved. If Scrivener were using a zip format it would have to regenerate the entire 100 mb archive every time it saved. Consider how long it takes to back up to zip right now, on a large project like that, and then imagine that happening every time you paused for two seconds.
This technique is useful for single documents and such, but for applications which work with potentially many hundreds of individual documents, and deal with multimedia, it is really impractical.
The only way to make it work would be to remove auto-save altogether and make project saving a manual affair you have to remember to do. As it stands, we already have that “feature” in the form of zipped back-ups. The result isn’t all that different than what you would get otherwise, too. Potentially better since you can automatically get a sequence of files instead of writing over the same one every time.
I think the general view is that while this is possible, it is dangerous because of the ease of corruption etc. of thumb drives and the nature of a scrivener project with its hundreds of embedded files.
Personally I’d only use a thumb-drive for something that’s valuable if I was also using second and third-line backups as well. And even then I’d hesitate.
I wouldn’t recommend it based strictly upon technological reliability. Flash-based storage technology is not as reliable as hard drive technology. I consider those things to be roughly equal to floppy drives of days past in both usage and trust.
I downloaded the Scrivener 1.5 installer on my MBP 'cos it’s quick. Rather than re-download it on the MBA, I copied the .dmg onto a thumb-drive, moved that over to the MBA … .dmg wouldn’t open; it had been corrupted somewhere along the line. I could have tried again, could have tried using my portable HD, but I just thought “Dammit!” and re-downloaded.
I think since Syncing our stuff is so important, Scrivener should just fix it for us. Why not do a quick update we can download that’ll make this syncing easy.
For now, isn’t just using a good Flash drive the fastest way to do syncing? I don’t know. I’m the most untechnical person in this thread.
I’m an avid user of both Dropbox AND Scrivener, and I’ve found the symlink method to be a pretty good way to get the two to play well together. As above posters have noted, the problem is with using Dropbox for live document updates. But here, the “live” document is in a local folder, and even if the Dropbox file is corrupted momentarily, eventually (say, after closing Scrivener) there will be a clean file uploaded. So it’s not really the same issue. Rather than finding a purely technological solution, it’s taking advantage of the fact that you’re probably not jumping back and forth between computers faster than Dropbox can update.
— then each time you do a backup it will be put in that folder, and in the case of DropBox will automatically be uploaded and synced to every linked computer.
— so backup times are not an issue.
Why not do a quick update we can download that’ll make this syncing easy.