For some large projects where I want to be able to review the development of a piece over time, I use folders as a kind of poor man’s version control system. Each day I am working, I duplicate the folder from the previous day, rename it to the new date
My Cool Thing
├─ 2024-10-22
│ ├─ 2024-10-22 My Cool Thing.dorico
│ └─ Flows from My Cool Thing
│ └─ 2024-10-22 My Cool Thing - Mvt. I.wav
├─ 2024-10-23
│ ├─ 2024-10-23 My Cool Thing.dorico
│ └─ Flows from My Cool Thing
│ ├─ 2024-10-23 My Cool Thing - Mvt. II.wav
│ └─ 2024-10-23 My Cool Thing - Mvt. IV.wav
└─ 2024-10-24
├─ 2024-10-24 My Cool Thing.dorico
└─ Flows from My Cool Thing
└─ 2024-10-24 My Cool Thing - Mvt. II.wav
There are lots of reasons not to do this, so I wouldn’t recommend it as a “default” workflow to anyone, but I have personal reasons for wanting to do this on this project, including both the ability to retrieve older versions on demand and the ability to share the development of the piece over time once it is done, if I so choose.
However, by default, the export location is always wherever that project was previously exported to. I can totally see why; it makes perfect sense for the normal workflow. However, because I am creating these copies of projects I would really love to not have to re-select the export location every time to have it export in the current day’s working directory! I would love to have a (maybe per-project?) setting that lets me always export in the same relative location, rather than the same absolute location.
It occurred to me while writing this that one obvious alternative here is to flip the way I work: just keep the current version of the project active at all times, and at the start of each day duplicate and “stash” it for the previous day’s work. I may use that approach going forward. It doesn’t quite solve all the same issues that my current approach does, though, in that one huge upside to my current workflow is that the project always has the date I was working on it attached, and so all the exports do so as well, so it’s less manual work on that end.
If folks have other workflow suggestions, I am all ears!