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Mistakenly have several timelines on same project

rafesteinberg
Wed, 04 Oct 2017 18:49:13 GMT

Hi, I'm a brand new user of ATL2 (1 week) and I've already screwed up. I inadvertently created five timelines all designed for the same project. Obviously that doesn't work, because changes made when one timeline is open will not appear in another. I discovered this error after noticing that changes of settings and synced data weren't sticking from one work session to the next. Two of the tinelines have been partially (but unreliably) synced. One of the unsynced ones has more events entered. So what is the best way to fix this? Should I just delete all 5 and start over? That would discard a lot of work. Is there some way to save the more complete of the synced versions, or would that risk syncing glitches down the road? (I posted this in another section yesterday. Got no response there. I apologize for double posting} TIA for all suggestions Rafe

Craig Schiller
Wed, 04 Oct 2017 19:38:18 GMT

I would save the most complete version and ditch the others after examining them to see if there's anything you want to manually copy over. FYI, you can always completely unsync and the resync a project if you absolutely have to (although I can't offhand think of any scenario where that would be necessary), so no worries there.

rafesteinberg
Wed, 04 Oct 2017 23:08:48 GMT

Thanks, Craig. That sounds reasonable. A related question, though. Besides any visible data changes that have been made in the syncing, does the syncing process leave any record of the syncing process on a Scrivener project? In other words, if I do as you suggest, might any syncing I might have done on the discarded timelines be remembered by the Project and therfore create future problems? I'm guessiing that the project retains no sycning record, but I'd like to be sure. Rafe

razyr
Thu, 05 Oct 2017 10:41:24 GMT

Hi, Rafe. If you want to clean up a Scrivener project of AT sync artifacts, you can go to the menu and select Project -> Meta Data Settings -> Custom Meta Data. From there you can manually delete elements of the metadata schema across all documents in the project. If you delete them all, this will essentially give you a clean start from Scrivener's perspective. You might also choose to just go in and zero out the values for specific entries. This would allow you to wipe information that may exist in one of your old timelines, but you want to ensure that it doesn't carry over to the new. Some writers deliberately have multiple AT2 timelines for a single project. For example, if you are writing a trilogy, you may have all three books in a single project but want to work with separate timelines. This is a safe practice if just a little bit tricky to do effectively.

aeonjess
Thu, 05 Oct 2017 13:23:39 GMT

Hi Rafe, Besides the actual values that were synced in the custom metadata fields, the only information the Scrivener project retains when syncing with a timeline is an id to represent the timeline it synced with and a timestamp of the last time it was synced. These values shouldn’t be visible to you. This is just used to identify if a certain Scrivener project and timeline file have been synced before and when, however all the actual syncing information is stored in the Aeon Timeline file, so you shouldn’t have any problems moving forward if you only want to sync with one file in the future. Jess