Drafts and snapshots

A Draft in Trove is a read-only snapshot of a Scene at a point in time. They live under .snapshots/ in the Manuscript, named <scene>.draft-<tag>.md.

When to snapshot

Whenever you’re about to make a change you might want to undo. Specifically:

• Restructuring a chapter — splitting it, merging it, cutting half.
• Changing POV — turning a third-person scene into first-person.
• Cutting a scene you might bring back — keep the Draft, then delete from the Manuscript.
• Submitting to a beta reader — snapshot the version you sent so you can refer back to “what they read”.

Trove auto-saves your edits, so Drafts are not a continuous history. They are deliberate. Take one when “I want to remember this version” is the reason.

How

Right-click a Scene → Snapshot draft. Trove prompts for an optional tag (a short slug like pre-cut or beta-1). Tag-less Drafts are timestamped.

You’ll see the new Draft in the Drafts rail on the right side of the editor when that Scene is open. It lists every snapshot, newest first.

Automatic snapshots

If you’d like a safety net you don’t have to remember, turn on hourly snapshots (Settings → Editor → auto-snapshot). While you’re working, Trove quietly snapshots the Scene you’ve been editing once an hour. Manual Drafts are still the tool for “remember this exact version” — the hourly ones are just insurance.

Comparing

Click a Draft in the rail to open a side-by-side comparison with the current Scene. Trove highlights added, removed, and changed lines.

Restoring

To roll the Scene back to a Draft: open the comparison view, click Restore. Trove copies the Draft over the Scene — but it also takes a fresh Draft of the current state first, so you don’t lose the version you’re rolling back from.

Storage

Drafts live in .snapshots/ inside the Manuscript. They’re plain .md files with the same content as the Scene at snapshot time.

manuscripts/bridgepoint/
  scenes/
    chapter-03.md
  .snapshots/
    chapter-03.draft-2026-07-10.md
    chapter-03.draft-pre-cut.md
    chapter-03.draft-beta-1.md

The Drafts rail and comparison UI lift from the filesystem on every open — there’s no index to corrupt. Delete a .draft-<tag>.md from Finder and it’s gone.

Drafts vs git

The two solve different problems:

	Drafts	git
Granularity	Per-Scene, coarse	Per-line, fine
Trigger	You explicitly snapshot	Every commit
Restore	One-click in Trove	git checkout
Diff	Side-by-side in Trove	Any git tool
Audience	You, mid-pass	Long-term history, collaborators

Use both if you want. Putting your Trove root in a git repo gives you commit-level history; using Drafts inside Trove gives you in-app, no-context-switch snapshots.

Drafts are not git, repeated

Drafts are not version control. If you’ve never snapshotted and you’ve made twenty changes, there’s nothing to roll back to except your last Draft (or what your backup tool kept). If lossy intermediate history matters, use git.

Status ‘draft’ is something else

Don’t confuse:

• Draft (this page) — a snapshot artifact.
• Status draft — a workflow state, meaning “actively being written”. See Scene → Status.

Same word, two meanings. Common gotcha.