I have a shared project as my active work presently. I had last sync on my iPhone about a week ago, and all was fine. I don’t normally use my iPhone as I have a iPad that works better (keyboard case).
Anyway, yesturday (the 7th), I was at my desk, working on my active project, and paused in my writing, reflecting on the magnificence that is the authorial arts… Ok, you got me, I was blocked and daydreaming. Autosave was current, Dropbox was in sync. And the electrical power died. I was on my MacMini, and it is not pluged into a UPS so down it went. After fumbling for my flashlight I decided to grab my iPad and pickup where I left off.
Scrivener detects the project open on my crashed machine, senses a conflict and goes through the conflict process. Annoying, but understandable. I close the project on my iPad, sync, then wait until sync has finished (and another ten seconds for good measure) and reload the project. I get a message about making sure the sync had finished. The two options were, to confirm sync was done, or cancel. I confirm, load my project, and find the new text in the conflict folder. Fine, annoying, but fine, nothing’s lost, and I can recover from this.
I edit on this a while, and finally stop for the day, syncing with Dropbox when I’m done. The power came back on while I slept, and I loaded up on my MacMini to fix contents of the conflict folder and make sure the master project has the right data. (I really wish there was a compare tool for dual edit windows, let me use the power of the computer rather than my imperfect eyeballs) This task finished I synced up again, closed out the project and started reading the L&L Forums, and found a post I could offer insight on, and loaded my iPhone to take a screen grab of the feature I was pointing out.
The iPhone beleived the project was still conflicted. Worse, after it finished sync, it re-added the previously dealt with conflicts folder, and added another, dupelicating the scenes in question into a new conflicts folder. I crash-quit (double tap home and flick) from Scrivener on my iPhone before it resynced again, and loaded it on my iPad, and to my horror, the conflicts were now there too. I verified that my iPad had the new post-power-failure edits and they did.
I loaded it on my MacMini and it too saw the additional conflicts folder.
I went back to my iPhone, and it STILL BELIEVED there to be an active conflict and I crash-quit rather rather repeat this process. I then deleted Scrivener from my iPhone and reinstalled it. Got it up and running and after pointing to the correct Dropbox folder, let it download the four projects there (2k files 34MB and about six minutes) I loaded up what I thought would be a latest edition of the file from Dropbox. Instead, it insists there is a conflict, asks me to close the project and re-sync (first time opening the project after reinstalling) and then confirm sync was complete before letting me see that it had again added to the conflicts folder, and reverted the project to what it looked like a week ago when I last synced on the iPhone.
I have since deleted Scrivener from my iPhone again, this time without knowing if I can risk re-installing it without it getting into a runaway conflict-copy screnario where everytime I load it on my iphone, it dupelications the entire conflicts tree and reverts to the oldest local edition.
Is there a file in my Dropbox folder I need to delete too?
Is there a way to force iOS Scrivener to trash the local copies of the project and download from Dropbox a fresh copy?
I feel like I ought to be able to handle this, but something somewhere is not resetting the flag and its only on my iPhone, which had the oldest local edition of the project when the power-failure left with a project that was not closed and synced properly. It works as expected on my iPad and my MacMini until I open it again on my iPhone and it resets the conflicts.
Dain