Quick Scrivener tip: Snapshots
Imagine you’re looking at a scene, itching to give it a good rewrite, but you’re unsure whether the rewrite will be better than the original. Yes, you could duplicate the scene or the whole project and give new names to a fresh copy. But there is an easier way… Snapshots.
Select the scene you want to work with. Hit Cmd-5 on the Mac or Ctrl-5 on Windows. Scrivener will now make a backup copy of the whole scene with the date while leaving a copy in place for you to work on. You can see the old scene in the Inspector if you choose the Snapshot icon.
You can roll back to the earlier version using the Roll Back button. The Compare button only appears on the Mac version at the moment and shows you what’s changed like this.
This is a really useful feature. Better for individual rewrites, in my opinion, than the track changes found in Word (though that definitely has the edge when it comes to dealing with changes made by other people). Revision is vital for me. That last five per cent of polishing can make the difference. With Snapshots you can revise away to your heart’s content and know you need never lose a thing.
Note too that you can give Snapshots a memorable name too — ‘the bit where he was still a vampire’. Very useful.
One Response to “Quick Scrivener tip: Snapshots”
Reblogged this on Speaking to the Eyes and commented:
I had a conversation with a writer friend recently about Scrivener and backups, and the subject of Snapshots came up. I’ve since learned that Snapshots aren’t really useful as a backup–Scrivener gives you a different option for that–but they’re still really useful.
The big idea here is being able to change your manuscript while being able to refer to a previous version…but I’ll let the article below tell you all about it:
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