We still recommend making manual backups, but Scrivener has features which backup your projects automatically.

When you first launch Scrivener, you’ll be asked where you want to create a backup folder. Scrivener for Windows keeps its backups in the app data folder by default, but this can be changed by the user.

It’s important to know where your backups are if you need to recover your project at any point, and you can locate your backup folder by opening File Options or pressing f12 and clicking on Backup.

This will display a list of options, and here at the bottom of the window, the location of your backup folder.

You can open the backup folder directly from here by clicking Open Backup Folder, or set a new location for your backups by clicking choose.

By default, Scrivener will back up your project every time you close it if you have made some changes to the project during that session.

As you can see, there are options here which allow you to adjust that.

You can choose to back up the project at the start of a session instead of the end or make a backup each time you save the project manually.

Scrivener will also save your work anyway, but by backing up on a manual save, you can control exactly when backups are made.

There’s also the option to backup before changes are synced from mobile devices, which is recommended if you’re syncing projects with the mobile version of Scrivener, using Dropbox.

While we’re on that subject, it’s worth noting that the Scrivener mobile app will not recognize or make changes to your backup files, so if you plan to sync your projects using Dropbox, it’s best to choose a location for the backup folder on your computer’s hard drive.

Scrivener is also set to keep up to five recent backups, but this can be adjusted to as few as three, as many as 25, or even to keep all the backup files.

Remember that keeping 25 backups of a project will take up a lot of storage space if you’ve imported high-resolution photos or videos, so keep that in mind.

It’s also worth noting that these are global preferences. They will apply to any projects you create in Scrivener, but you can Open Project> Project Settings and go to backup to exclude this specific project from your automatic backups or set a custom backup folder solely for this project.

That’s about all we need to cover for backups.

Thanks for watching and happy writing.