I am at a place with my project where i will be working with an editor/co-writer. So far all of the files and software are on my Windows PC. I want to transfer it all to a dropbox that we will share. I see that this is an elegant process on an IOS machine, but does not seem intuitively elegant on a PC. Are there any tips and tricks for this process that 1. allows for an easy trasfer of the project to a dropbox folder, and 2. allows for both of us to work on the project at the same time?
I will likely have more questions.
I was going to say please reply like I am a child, but better, reply like I’m an old guy who is new to Scrivener and doesn’t know all the lingo yet.
It’s not possible for two people to edit the same project at the same time.
To use Dropbox to share a project, simply make sure the Dropbox software is installed and running on both systems, and that both systems are able to access the specific folder you want to use.
With Scrivener closed, drag the project into the designated sharing folder. Make sure you get the entire .scriv folder.
It’s probably a good idea to also make the entire folder available off-line so that a full copy of all the bytes resides in your local storage (on both machines). You do this by right-clicking on the folder, open the Dropbox item from the context menu, and make sure the “Make online-only” item is not selected.
I’ve been using Dropbox this way for a long time and haven’t had a single problem.
Above all, @kewms’ first comment is an immutable law.
I’ve been working with collaborators using Scrivener for many years now… fortunately we are in 7–8 hour separated time-zones, which makes things much easier! As said above, two people can’t have the same project open at the same time. If you try to open a project that is already open you get an alert; in that alert it says do you want to open a copy, but you must resist that at all costs as you’ll end up in a real mess.
The other important thing is to give Dropbox enough time to upload the changes and close the project—the last stage of which seems to be deleting the user-lock—before shutting down the computer that’s been accessing it, and to allow enough time for Dropbox to download changes to the project before opening it on the second machine. Being too hasty can cause conflicted files, or getting the alert that the project is in use, even when you know it isn’t.
My advice is also to set automatic back-up on both opening and closing the project. Doing so means you will each have a back-up of what the other has done before you work on it yourself. Disk space is cheap compared with the risk of losing not only your current work but also your collaborator’s work that preceded it. And take a snapshot of each document you intend to make changes to before you start work on it.
All that said, there is at least one thread, or is it a knowledge base article, where an alternative method of collaborating is explained, with one person acting as lead writer holding the master copy and giving the collaborator access to a version that they work on, and which is then merged with the master project by the lead writer when they have finished their session. Even with that system, it is important to schedule things so that they don’t both try to work on the same bit of the project at the same time.
I’ve mentioned that approach in a thread – don’t have time to look it up at the moment – but you can also look for the “Import and Merge” command in the manual.