Backups

Modeled on Scrivener’s own automatic backup scheme. File > Settings > History:

• Off by default — a master “Enable automatic backups” switch, plus independent triggers for backing up when opening a project, when closing a project, and on every manual save (Ctrl+S/:w/:wq — not the silent autosave that runs on losing focus or switching documents)
• Each backup is a zipped, timestamped snapshot of the whole project folder — {project name}-{YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS}.zip — written to one shared backup folder (defaulting to the platform’s data directory, browsable to somewhere else, with a Reset button to go back to the default) rather than inside the project itself, so it survives the project folder being moved or deleted
• Multiple projects share the same backup folder; each project’s own backups are told apart by their filename prefix, so keeping or pruning one project’s backups never touches another’s
• A backup includes everything under the project folder that isn’t excluded by a .gitignore/.ignore file — including .smaragd/ (manuscript ordering, folder roles, story cards, and the rest of the project’s own metadata) — but always skips .git, since that’s redundant with git’s own history and often the single largest thing in the folder
• Backups to keep (1–100, default 10) caps how many of a project’s own snapshots are kept; the oldest are deleted once a new backup pushes past that count
• A failed backup shows as an error toast and never blocks whatever you were doing (opening/closing a project, saving) — a backup is a safety net, not a precondition for those
• There’s no in-app restore, and no manual “back up now” action — only the three triggers above. To restore a backup, unzip it somewhere and open the resulting folder as a project (File > Open Project) the normal way