Yet Another iPad Dropbox sync issue

Scrivener Scrivener for iOS
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I’m returning to writing and worldbuilding after a hiatus of several years and I’m excited to be back. For a long time whenever I looked at the project I got overwhelmed, didn’t know what I’d been thinking when I started, and set it back aside.

I have a MacBook Pro and most of my writing has been done on Mac, but I just bought an iPad Pro with the Pro keyboard and I’ve been liking the portability. I set up my files in Dropbox years ago so that I could use the iOS apps and I know that I need to make sure never ever to even breathe on Mac Scrivener when iPad Scrivener is open, or vice versa.

I’ve refreshed my memory with the sync advice; I was actually hoping that in the last nine years maybe the multi-device/multi-platform issues had been resolved. It looks like it hasn’t changed at all, so maybe I should count that as “resolved”. :slight_smile:

There are tradeoffs between the versions which I’ll get into elsewhere in the forum but I’ve been liking using the iPad version of Scrivener. It seems simpler and I’m not having font/formatting issues like I do with my project on Mac.

So right now I’m keeping Scrivener on Mac closed and only working on iPad and that seems to be working fine, except that every time I open the document it tells me:

“Sync conflicts detected.
To help Scrivener resolve the conflicts, please double-check that Dropbox is fully synced before opening this project.”

When I see this I hit cancel and tap the sync button. Scrivener pops up the “Syncing with Dropbox” window, says it’s downloading the file list for a few seconds, says, “Dropbox is up to date” and that’s that. So I open my project and it says, “Sync conflicts detected” all over again.

If I assure Scrivener that the files are really up to date (scary)

Yes, this sounds a lot like "Sync conflicts detected" on iPad but no changes on Desktop observed , especially because when I look on the Mac and hit the little cloud icon on my Dropbox/Apps/Scrivener folder the dates don’t change.

I’m confident I’m not actually losing anything. I saved a .zip file from the iPad to iCloud and unzipped it on Mac, and opened that up. It looks fine with changes I made on desktop a week ago and the changes I made since on iPad.

But I’m still getting the Sync conflicts message. Every time.

I love my Scrivener. Dropbox is kinda garbage though. I’d have deleted Dropbox 100% if it weren’t the only supported solution.

Any suggestions that aren’t in the docs or that I’ve obviously missed in the docs?

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Replying to myself because I found the problem. Not the cause, exactly, but the problem.

Inside the .scriv package in the Settings directory there are a ton of conflicted files. Dropbox apparently keeps choking on its own flagged conflicts but with no mechanism to resolve the conflicts it just prevents the files from ever being seen by Dropbox as completely downloaded.

How did these conflicts arise when I closed Scrivener for Mac before I even began the process of checking that the Dropbox folders were synced on the new iPad? I have a hypothesis, but the answer is that Dropbox is garbage. Maaaayyybe Apple gets a tiny bit of blame here too but follow along for a moment:

The key is: new iPad. And I had an old iPad. I let Apple transfer everything from the old iPad to the new iPad which might have been a mistake but it was convenient.

Apple’s automagic device content transfer moved all my files including all of my Dropbox files. But Dropbox did not see the new iPad as the same device as the old iPad. It’s a new device. Since I already had the maximum allowed number of devices (three) connected to Dropbox device number 4 doesn’t get synced. So I was sitting there with old versions of my Scrivener directory (and anything else in Dropbox) in the place Dropbox gets stored in iPadOS (I assume it’s something like ~/Dropbox just like on MacOS but I’ve never looked at the i(x)OS filesystem).

I removed the old iPad from my account and added the new iPad, and here’s my guess: Dropbox treated all those old files as new, because it’s a new device. But they all had old timestamps, because they were old files. So confusing for poor Dropbox. Dropbox flagged the changed files as conflicts (fair enough) and from there on in depending on where or when it was being asked it either said, “no problem” or “there’s a file here, but I’m not done downloading it”.

I take that back. Now, after over four hours, the icon for my novel project just turned from a spinning blue arrow to a yellow caution triangle with text that says, “file type may not update”.

So I’m going to copy my files out of Dropbox, manually diff these config files, delete the projects from the iPad and from Dropbox and start the whole process of “syncing” (as if that word really applies here) fresh from scratch.

Or maybe, because it sticks in my craw that Dropbox has the unmitigated gall to charge users for the “extra feature” of storing our own files on our own devices, I’ll put this stuff on a thunderbolt drive and sneakernet my project between devices olde skool.

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That indeed would be your problem.

Since you have already stated that you are going to copy everything out of DropBox…. Copy to local storage and then delete everything on DropBox that is perma-conflicted. Then you can try to put it back up there to see what happens.

As an aside, when you are getting the “make sure the project is sync’d” message, you probably should cancel out on the iPad, run a DropBox sync, and when it finishes, close Scrivener on the iPad and open it on your Mac and let the Scrivener there process the conflicts. I’ve had better luck with killing conflicts that seem to persist on iPad.

Another way to deal with this is to duplicate the project and migrate to using the copy.

I’ve been bouncing between MacBooks, Windows machines, and iPads (plural on all three) while keeping myself restricted to DropBox’s free tier for years. There is always a snafu or two when I introduce new hardware. I’ve only once used Apple’s migration tool though. Maybe that’s where I had an advantage.

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Thanks. I’ve actually continued to have problems, so I’m calling the above having found a problem rather than the problem.

The problem I’m having now is maaaaybe not a problem? I’ve tested back and forth and all my changes seem to be going just fine. But on iPad if I look at the folder in the Dropbox app my project just spins and never updates. That’s after duplicating the project, deleting the one in Dropbox, and adding the duplicate with a new name (“Peregrine 2026.scriv” instead of “Peregrine.scriv”).

The first time I made a change and saved it in Scrivener on iPad it (I think this was something that Dropbox did, not something that Scrivener did, but it was triggered by Scrivener’s sync) was create a new project bundle called “Peregrine 2026 (2).scriv”

But the changes were made to the correct file and I saw those changes on Desktop too.

When I look at the Dropbox folder /Apps/Scrivener in the iPad Files app, it says that “Peregrine 2026.scriv” is zero bytes.

I think my next step is to delete not only the projects in Dropbox’s /Apps/Scrivener but to delete the folder itself, and let iPad Scrivener re-create it.

I just had a horrible thought, that maybe I had the document open on Scrivener for iPhone. But I checked it and nothing is open. In fact, when I hit “sync” it asked me whether I wanted to Update From iTunes or to Link Dropbox. (It does show an old version of my file list under the heading “Dropbox” so that’s still scary and I should probably fix it even if I’m not planning to use it).

As far as the automatic migration, yes I really probably should have just set up the Pro from scratch. I was a little impatient and frankly still a little lightheaded from spending that much money on a tablet. I was going through the setup stuff when I first took it out of the box and I think it asked if I wanted to transfer my settings. Maybe I misread it but I wasn’t thinking I was transferring all my data from the iCloud backup of my older iPad until it started. I wasn’t even in the same county as my old iPad when I did that!

That reminds me of another potential issue. I know the manual says that the i(x)OS versions have always been compatible with the 3.x file format. The manual also mentions a number of differences between the MAS version and the direct sale version of Scrivener. I had Scrivener 2 from the Mac App Store but bought Version 3 direct from L&L in 2017. And I mentioned that my writing has had a long (6-7 year) hiatus. I don’t think I opened any of my Scrivener projects on my last iPad in the time I owned it (purchased in 2021). It’s possible that some setting or config file or something under the hood transferred which hadn’t changed since the 3rd gen iPad I had before that.

Point is, if I’m deleting and rebuilding the dropbox folder I probably ought to also delete Scrivener from the iPad Pro and reinstall it fresh.

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One more weird clue:

In addition to /Apps/Scrivener my Dropbox also has a /scrivener directory, with two files:

peregrine.scriv
peregrine (1).scriv

They’re each 963KB versus the 145MB of my actual project. And one of them is actually timestamped a couple weeks ago. The other is timestamped 2022.

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This won’t help you with your syncing challenges, but just FYI, you don’t need to install the Dropbox app on iPhones or iPads to sync Scrivener to Dropbox–iOS Scrivener itself takes care of linking and syncing. This means that iPhones and iPads don’t count toward the 3 device Dropbox limit, unless you want to install the Dropbox app on those devices for some other reason. But you don’t need the iOS Dropbox app to sync iOS Scrivener via Dropbox.

(You do need to install the Dropbox app on Windows and Mac desktops if you want to sync desktop Scrivener using Dropbox, and those installations will count against the 3 device limit.)

Late last year I went through the same thing, when I returned to a novel I’d originally worked on over 2021-2022. So I know exactly what you mean about being overwhelmed! However, I committed myself to doing Novel November (a NaNoWriMo replacement) and used that as a way to reengage with the story. Spending a few weeks reviewing the outline and all of my notes definitely helped, but it wasn’t until I sat down and started writing scenes that I really began to remember who the characters were, what they wanted, and what they were willing to do to get it–that’s when things really began to click for me. I’m at about the halfway point of the book now, and feel confident that I’ll be able to complete the first draft within the next 4-6 months.

All that to say, I wish you the very best as you get back into to your story. I encourage you to take your time and extend yourself a ton of grace as you refamiliarize yourself with this world you’ve created. Most importantly, have fun!

Best,
Jim

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That’s good to know, thank you. I have a bunch of cruft in Dropbox and I’ll look at it to see what I can delete from old installs etc.

And thank you so much for your kind words! I don’t know whether it’s distance from the project which helped or if it’s something else, but now I’m seeing characters that need to be better developed instead of plot points that don’t make sense. Getting clearer about these characters will resolve those scenes. Of course maybe not totally, but it will light the path. It’s a much better place being “hey here’s what I have to build” instead of “oh no, here’s what I have to fix”.

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Yes. My last read through of my WIP led to a list of scenes to write or expand, which somehow feels much less daunting.

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