E.S. Ivy

author of middle grade books for children

What does storage in the cloud mean?

by

What does storage in the cloud mean? Everyone says I should be backing-up in the cloud — what does it mean?

Storing “in the cloud” just means that you’re going to store your files somewhere remotely on someone else’s computer, usually a computer owned by some big company. You can pay for this, but there are a lot of places that will give you some space for free. Right now, Dropbox offers 2 GB for free, and that’s what I use to backup my work.

There’s one thing that’s kind of confusing about cloud storage. The way cloud storage works is that you put things you want saved in the cloud into a folder on your computer. The cloud service will access that folder and make copies in the cloud.

From the Dropbox Help Center,

“…using [the Dropbox application] on your computer is just like using any other folder on your hard drive, except the files you drag into your Dropbox folder automatically sync online and to any other computers or mobile devices linked to your account. The application runs in the background and automatically keeps your files in sync and backed up online. It’s like having the same folder on all of your computers and mobile devices at the same time.”

This means that in addition to having a copy storied in the cloud, you’ll also have a copy saved on your hard drive, where you put it for the cloud service to look for it. So you automatically have two copies!

If you use the link above, or this link to Dropbox we both get 500 megabites of free bonus space in addition to the 2 GB! It’s a win-win. Just sign up, and they have a great tutorial to guide you to set up.

Where does Scrivener save files? Scrivener for Windows

by

where does scrivener for windows save filesWhere 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.)…

Read More »

Scrivener – Safely Saving Scrivener Files and Projects Tutorial

by

Scrivener - If you're writing your novel in Scrivener, make sure you're backing up your projects! Tutorial on how to safely save and backup and your Scrivener Files.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….

Read More »

Scrivener – How to Find Scrivener for Windows files or projects on your computer

by

find scrivener files on your computerIf 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!…

Read More »