Dramatic increase speed when zipping backups (by Scrivener) with a fast Mac?

[Max_G]

This is a question for (heavy) users of Scrivener who switched from an (older) Intel Mac to a Mac with an M2 processor.

My situation:

• Scriveners' automatic backup is enabled (making zips in a folder on my Mac).
• The average size of my Scrivener files is 300-400 Mb.
• I usually work on several Scrivener files at the same time. Regularly opening and closing them through the day (yes I know I can put them in the dock without closing).
• When I close/zip a file, the waiting time can be well over 10 seconds per Scrivener file.
• I'm on a Macbook Pro 15" mid 2015, 2.8 GHz i7 (DG) 16GB/1TB (Monterey 12.6.6. Scrivener 3.3.1).

Question: I'm wondering if a Mac with a M2 processor dramatically shortens the backup time (so, making zips in a folder on my Mac). Could 10 seconds be brought back to 2 seconds? Would there be much difference between a MBA M2 and a MBP M2?

 

[bobcomer]

It'll definitely be a lot faster, but no way to tell how much. It all depends on how optimized for AS Scrivener is, but probably 2secs is not out of the question. The MBA is passively cooled, so the more you push it, the more it's going to thermally throttle, so you would have to determine how much you think you're going to use it.

I personally would get the MBP because I know my workload brings an MBA to it's knees.

I just looked at the web page for Scrivener, cool product, but they don't mention if there's an apple silicon version and the download is for MacOS High Sierra. It'll still be a lot faster than your intel mac, but maybe you should contact them to see if they are doing a version for AS...

 

[Barbabenno]

Scrivener is a Universal app. I wouldn't know how fast it would be with huge files like yours.

I tried a small test by copying a few large images in a new file, resulting in a 85 Mb zip file. Opening took approx 7-8 sec on my Macbook M1 Air 16 Gb, closing when I made a few changes approx 4-5 sec. I'm not sure whether this is representative for your actual case, and it is possible that I made some mistakes whereby the results are different than they would be in real-life cases, so take this with a grain of salt.

 

[brookter1]

Scrivener has been M1 capable from the beginning (High Sierra is mentioned because the Intel version is 64bit only so can't use MacOS before that).

The issue with zipped backups is that every Scrivener project is a bundle (folder) of RTF files, text and (possibly) image files, bound together by an XML index file. Documents in the binder are loaded in and out of memory as they're needed, which is why it can handle very big documents.

Every item in the binder has its own RTF (or image) file, so if your project is 300-400MB then it probably has either a lot of documents in the binder, or many images (or both).

When you create a zipped Scrivener backup, all you are really doing behind the scenes is zipping up the entire project folder and it will take the same amount of time as zipping any folder with a similar breakdown of contents. It's not really Scrivener specific.

So, with the M2, you're likely to see an increase in the speed of the zipping, but also in the reading / writing to disk, because the new machine will have a faster SSD than a seven-year old one. Quite how much faster depends on exactly how the project is made up – i.e. the proportion of text to images – I would imagine.

BTW, if your documents are large because they're full of images, you could cut down the zip backup time a lot by make aliases to the images and keeping them outside the project folder, rather than importing them. Of course, you'd then be responsible for backing up the images separately, so that may not be useful for you.

If you are opening and closing each project several times a day, you could also try turning off the automatic backup feature and only doing that once at the end of the day, thereby reducing the amount of zipping. But again, that may not be convenient…

 

[Max_G]

Thanks brookter1 for your extensive comments!

Yes, I thought all your suggestions over and indeed none of them is convenient I'm afraid

The main reason I make automatic backup zips is because the folder the zips are in is connected to the folder of my cloud service (sync.com) through a symlink. As you may know, unzipped Scrivener files can lead to problems when syncing.

While I know Scrivener works on AS-processors, I'm not sure Scrivener is already optimized for them. On the other hand, as you explained, the zipping process is (most likely) the bottleneck, not Scrivener itself.

Maybe Scriveners' built in zipper is not that fast. And it compresses the files, which takes extra time. Keka for example, offers the possibility to zip without compression, which goes (much) faster.

I tested things on the M1 iMac of my girlfriend and the Scrivener zipping didn't make much difference with my MBP.

So, I'm still curious what a M2 MBP would do

 

[Barbabenno]

Did you try unchecking the option 'Compress automatic backups as zip files (slower)'? Maybe that still produces a single archive but uncompressed? At least it says that having it checked is slower.

 

[brookter1]

The main reason I make automatic backup zips is because the folder the zips are in is connected to the folder of my cloud service (sync.com) through a symlink. As you may know, unzipped Scrivener files can lead to problems when syncing.

It depends on the cloud service… Dropbox is fine, but some others aren't. I've no experience of sync.com, so like you I wouldn't trust it for unzipped backups either! (I keep the projects in Dropbox and zip to iCloud Drive, which works really well.)

I think Scrivener is optimised for M1+, but it's not really doing anything that's ever going to use the full power of the chip anyway - as you say, the bottlenecks are the reading/zipping/saving of files, which are OS functions anyway. I don't think Scrivener provides its own zip program. You could test this by closing Scrivener down completely and using Finder to compress the project – how does the time compare?

The only other thing I can suggest is asking the question on https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/ as there are plenty of users with big projects who may have some better ideas than I.

Good luck…

 

[Max_G]

It depends on the cloud service… Dropbox is fine, but some others aren't. I've no experience of sync.com, so like you I wouldn't trust it for unzipped backups either! (I keep the projects in Dropbox and zip to iCloud Drive, which works really well.)

Even Dropbox is not 100% reliable in this. In the Scrivener Reddit sub there are quite a few posts where people tell about loosing data due to incomplete syncing with DB. I experienced that myself too (with sync.com).

About the speeed thing, I meanwhile know the solution is uncompressed zipping. That goes blazingly fast. So I made a feature request for this at L&L. You could check out the thread on Reddit if you are interested.