SAVING
A very important aspect of a program such as Scrivener is how it saves documents. Scrivener auto-saves so that you don’t have to worry about saving at all if you don’t want to. That said, if you’re anything like me, “not worrying” about saving is an impossibility, so here is how things work: every time you make a change to a document, an asterisk “*” appears next to the project title in the top-left of the window

 
 At this point, Scrivener knows that it needs to save as soon as possible. It does so as soon as there is no activity for two seconds or more (although you can change the amount of time it waits in the “General” pane of the Options)—that way, saving a large document will not interrupt what you are doing. It also checks whether it needs to save when a project is closed and when you quit the application, and saves if so. Once things are saved, the asterisk disappears.
Although the auto-save feature keeps your work safe 99.99999% of the time, and while I hope you never experience any crashes, every program has the occasional bug lurking around, so for the sake of your—and my—own sanity, there is a “force save” feature. This just works the same way as a normal save in a regular app. Hit Ctrl+S or go to File > Save to force any changes you have made to be saved without having to wait the two seconds for an auto-save. Note that because of the auto-save feature, if you close a project while the asterisk is visible, you will not be asked whether you want to save your changes, as many programs do, because the changes will be saved automatically.
If you’re like many writers, you’ve probably grown accustomed to thinking of saving as a way of confirming a series of edits. You can save a file, work for a while, and if you like where things are going you can press Ctrl-S to save and continue one. If you don’t like how things are going, you can use the program’s revert feature, or just close without saving and re-open the document. Since Scrivener auto-saves continually in the background, you might find this new way of working to be a little jarring to this habitual routine. I recommend getting used to using Snapshots (Ctrl-5) in the same way that you’ve used Save in the past. Whenever you feel like you’ve reached a small milestone, just hit Ctrl-5, listen for the camera shutter, and then move on. If you don’t like how things went with the last batch of edits, you can use the Snapshots pane to revert back to the last checkpoint. Periodically I like to wipe out all of the untitled snapshots just to keep things clean and to reduce confusion between those as the big milestones I want to keep around for longer (I usually name those).
Once you get used to the new shortcut, we hope you’ll find this way of working to be superior to the old. For one, your work is always saved, second you get an automatic trail whenever you “save” with snapshots, rather than just replacing one single copy on your disk over and over, and third due to how Scrivener encourages working on small pieces of your draft instead of long files, your snapshots will be relevant to the specific portion of text you were working on, allowing a non-linear approach to retrieving older edits.

LAYOUTS
If you find yourself opening and closing the binder and inspector frequently, or spending a lot of time setting up the corkboard or outliner view to appear in the right place for a particular task, check out the Layouts feature, which can be accessed by selecting “Manage Layouts” from the View > Layout menu. This allows you to save the state of the interface and quickly return to it at a later time.

SCRATCH PAD
If you have to gather a lot of research in other applications and find yourself doing a lot of copying and pasting into Scrivener, the Scratch Pad  feature may be useful. You paste or type any notes into it and send them to one of your open projects straight away or at some point later.  The Scratch Pad is separate from your projects, but can be called up from the Tools > Scratch Pad menu command. When inactive it will apppear ghosted so you can see behind it, but it will otherwise always float above every window on the system.

BACKING UP YOUR WORK
Back Up To... (available from the File > Back Up > Back Up To… menu command) is your friend... Use it frequently to save copies of your project (you can save copies as archived .zip files, too) to ensure that your work is always backed up. Think of this as your “global snapshot” feature. In addition to this, Scrivener will by default automatically back up your project each time you close it. These backups are stored in your AppData folder, and so are invisible in a default installation of Windows. However you can easily get to them by loading up the Tools > Options… window, select the Backup tab, and then click on the “Open Backup Folder…” button at the bottom. You can also specify an alternate location for where backups should be saved. This can be pointed at a network synchronised folder like Dropbox for additional redundancy. For the most part this all will happen without your knowledge; an invisible safety net. However in the case of projects that grow to be quite large, you might find a drop in performance while closing the project. Consult the user manual for tips on how to optimise the system for larger projects.

FILE FORMAT
Just a quick note on the file format, by the way: the .scriv folder is a cohesive complex of files and sub-folders and should not under any circumstances be tampered with by anything other than Scrivener. All of your work is actually stored as multiple RTF and XML files inside various sub-folders within the .scriv folder including the .scrivx project file. This means that even in the worst possible crash case, if a .scriv folder became hopelessly corrupted (although I hope this will never happen), you would still be able to open and edit all of your work in another program (such as WordPad). That said, you should not edit the RTF files inside a .scriv package in any other program if you intend to keep using them inside Scrivener, as this may cause problems with Scrivener’s footnotes, links and search features. Use the File > Export > Export Files… feature if you want to get your files out of Scrivener.
It’s also probably not a good idea to store your own files inside the “My Project.scriv” folder. While we’ll make every attempt to not disturb that which Scrivener has not created, we cannot guarantee the safety of the files you put inside this curated folder. If you have auxiliary support files you’d like to store along with your project (such as compiled versions), we recommend putting them all into a folder alongside with the .scriv folder.