author of middle grade books for children
In this tutorial I’m going take you through the steps for backing up Scrivener files (or projects.) You’re going to save your Scrivener files three places.
1. Save your working copies to your computer hard drive.
2. Save the 25 most recent automatic backups to a second location, such as in the cloud.
3. Save an infinite number of manual backups to removable storage, like a memory card….
Where does Scrivener for Windows save files – your working copies?
It seems obvious, I know. But if you were overwhelmed by all of Scrivener’s features and didn’t pay much attention when you created your first project, you might not have paid attention to where your files were being saved.
Scrivener saves your project working copies to where you designate when you first create it.
This is also the place where Scrivener auto-saves every time your Scrivener screen goes idle for 2 seconds. And it’s going to be saved directly over your old file, just like if you had used File>Save or Ctrl + S in your old word processor. (Oh, who are we kidding? Everyone used Microsoft Word.)…
Scrivener is an amazing piece of writing software! It’s great for constructing a novel or even keeping track of all your blog posts. But it has a few moving parts.
At some point in learning how to use it you probably have the urge to GET BACK TO WRITING ALREADY. If you’re at that point, but are smart enough to not start off without being absolutely sure you’re backing up to the right places, I’m going to fully explain how to do that. Or if you’re like me, and hobbled together a backup “somewhere” and mailed yourself backup files “just in case” and were relying on “Recent documents” to find what you’ve been working on – you might have quite a mess. Here’s how to figure out a place to put things….
If you’ve been depending on using File > Recent Projects to open your Scrivener files, you might have a moment of panic when you get enough projects started that one of them drops off the list! Where is it on your computer?
If you search the Scrivener 1.7 for Microsoft Windows Users Manual, you’ll find this clue:
“Projects can also be opened directly using the Explorer, or any shortcuts to the .scrivx file.”
But if you search in your file explorer (that probably looks like a stack of folders on your desktop or in your toolbar), for .scrivx you’ll find a whole list of “project.scrivx” and none of them will have your project names on them!…
If you’re baffled by what file, exactly, you need to click on to open an existing project in Scrivener for Microsoft Windows, this guide will help you!
(You might also be thinking of this as needing to know how to open a Scrivener file. Folders, files, documents, and projects in Scrivener; they all get a bit confusing!)…