Blog Saves and the Doom of Scrivener

So a while back my Desktop died. I did some investigating and saw that the PSU's chord connection was dodgy so got a new PSU installed it and . . . nope still dead. So I did the usual test checking removing RAM Sticks, etc. still no joy so I removed the SSD card and checked in an external HD Dock and the thing was fried. Wouldn't load and recovery software couldn't read it. 

Not complete bad news I can grab a new SSD card. Not sure if I'll have to get a new copy of Windows, whatever. I could just get a new PC I guess. All of which is small beans and a minor inconvenience. Or at least it would have been if I hadn't stopped writing my RPG projects in Google docs and treated myself to a Scrivner license.

Scrivener is a brilliant tool for organising and writing projects it does all sorts of stuff really well and all sorts of stuff that general WP programs don't do. But it doesn't do Saves (or more properly Save As) in a particularly helpful way. It does autosave well (every 2 seconds) but its Save As function doesn't work the way you might expect . . .

"When you choose Save As and save a file, the new file becomes the active project. This means that you shouldn't use the Save As command to make a copy of a project, such as if you want to put it on a cloud storage service, or share it with someone, if you plan to continue working on the file. If you don't pay attention, you may continue to write in the copied project, and not have the changes in your main project."

. . . to make matters worse it's not easy or intuitive to set of sync to cloud either. The software doesn't like the idea of you working on different devices. You can see where this is going can't you . . .sighs . . . so yeah lost some work.

I'm kicking myself as I know the truism that "data doesn't exist unless it is stored in at least three different places" and always used to practice that by having copies of my writing on the local HD, a USB stick, a powered External HDD and more recently on could. But I let that good practice slip cos it's a pain to do with Scrivener projects and I've also never had my HD die on me before in all the years I've been a PC user. Oh well, you live and you learn.

So what was lost? Mostly it was the new custom classes I've been working on for my new setting 'Gods of the Seven Cities: An Old School Sumerian Sandbox', that and some of the Guardians of the temple for my portal campaign, and my master list of project ideas.

The project ideas are no biggy. I can remember most of 'em and any I can't remember obviously weren't worth developing. The portal stuff isn't a total disaster I only lost a couple of monster entries and as they were the last thing I wrote I think I can redo those pretty easily.

The Gods of the Seven Cities classes, now that would have been a major disaster for me but luckily I was posting those to this blog. So I've only lost the finalised wrestling rules for the Enkidu class, and a few minor pieces of background and brainstorming for the project. 

I think that's it for me and Scrivener though. It's a great piece of software but the way it stores projects just doesn't work for the way I work. So it's back to Google docs again I guess and time to copy and paste the bits of Seven cities that were posted on here and the months-old Scrivener save from the one time I worked on the laptop.

Still, onward and upward as they say. I thank the many gods of the seven cities and this blog that I don't have to recreate the five class write-ups I'd already done from nothing.