Can Skarvia see the rest of my Dropbox?

No. The Dropbox connection is App-folder scoped, so Skarvia can only read and write inside its own folder at Apps/Skarvia. Everything else in your Dropbox is invisible to it, and that limit is enforced by Dropbox rather than by Skarvia's own code.

Where do my documents appear in Dropbox?

Inside Apps/Skarvia, in a folder named after your project. The path you type in the storage dialog is relative to that app folder, so /My Novel/Chapter 1 becomes Apps/Skarvia/My Novel/Chapter 1.skarvia.json alongside a .txt copy.

What happens to my files if I disconnect Dropbox?

Everything already written to Dropbox stays exactly where it is. Skarvia stops mirroring, and documents pointed at Dropbox show a disconnected state until you reconnect. Reconnecting picks the stalled documents back up automatically.

Chapter 4 · Where Your Work Lives

Connecting Dropbox

Connecting Dropbox gives your manuscript a home outside Skarvia. This chapter covers the handoff itself, the folder Skarvia is sandboxed into, how paths translate, and every way the connection can go wrong.

What connecting does

Once Dropbox is connected, any document you point at it is written into your own Dropbox as real files as you work: the full document, a plain-text copy, a chapter file per detected section, and a .versions/ folder. Chapter 3 covers what each of those files is for. This chapter is about the connection underneath them.

The connection belongs to your account rather than to one document, so you authorise Dropbox once and then choose it per document from the storage dialog.

Connecting it

There are two doors to the same place:

From your Account page, under the storage section: Connect Dropbox.
From inside the editor, when you pick Dropbox in the storage dialog and have not connected yet. A Connect button appears in the dialog.

Either way you are sent to Dropbox to approve the connection, then returned to where you started. Starting from the editor returns you to that document rather than dumping you on the account page.

Do not leave the Dropbox screen sitting open. The token that carries you through the handoff is deliberately short-lived and expires after ten minutes. If you wander off mid-approval, you land back on your account page with an error rather than a connection. There is nothing to repair: click Connect again and go through it without the interruption.

You have to be signed in to Skarvia to start the handoff. If your session has lapsed you are sent to sign in first.

What Skarvia can see

The connection is App-folder scoped. Dropbox gives Skarvia one folder of its own, at Apps/Skarvia, and nothing outside it exists as far as the application is concerned. It cannot read your tax returns, your photos, or another app's folder, and this is enforced by Dropbox rather than by a promise in Skarvia's code.

The access token is encrypted where it is stored, and Skarvia asks for offline access so it can refresh that token quietly instead of asking you to reconnect every few hours.

Where your files land

Because of the app-folder sandbox, every path you type is relative to Apps/Skarvia. This is the detail that confuses people, so concretely:

You type	It lands at
`/My Novel/Chapter 1`	`Apps/Skarvia/My Novel/Chapter 1.skarvia.json`, plus `.txt` and `.versions/` beside it
`/Scripts/Pilot/Act One`	`Apps/Skarvia/Scripts/Pilot/Act One.skarvia.json`

Skarvia proposes a path for you, built from your project title and document title, so the common case needs no typing at all. Do not add a "Skarvia" folder of your own to the front: you would end up with Apps/Skarvia/Skarvia/….

Two rules the path field enforces:

It must be a full path starting with / and must not end with one. You are naming the document, not the folder; the file extensions are added for you.
Characters Dropbox cannot store in a name (\ : * ? " < > |) are stripped out of project and document titles when the path is built, so a document called What Now? becomes What Now on disk.

If a file already occupies the name Skarvia was going to suggest, it steps the suggestion past it rather than colliding. And if you point a document at a path where a .skarvia.json already exists, the push stops and the document reads occupied instead of overwriting a file it did not write.

When it syncs

Skarvia pushes to Dropbox as you write, on save, throttled to at most once every ten seconds for any one document. You do not have to do anything to trigger it and there is no sync button to remember.

Some events push immediately rather than waiting out the throttle: choosing or changing a document's storage destination, and reconnecting an account that had fallen out of touch.

The chip in the editor's status bar is the honest answer to "has this reached Dropbox yet".

When the connection breaks

Tokens expire, people revoke apps, and Dropbox occasionally says no. Skarvia refreshes the token automatically when it can. When it cannot, the affected documents stop mirroring and their storage state reads disconnected.

The repair is to connect Dropbox again from your Account page. Reconnecting does more than restore the token: every document that was sitting in a disconnected or error state is pushed again straight away, so a day of writing that never reached the cloud catches up by itself. You do not have to visit each document and nudge it.

Nothing is lost while the connection is down. Skarvia still holds your working copy and still takes version checkpoints; only the mirror into your Dropbox is paused.

Disconnecting

Account page, then Disconnect Dropbox. What that does and does not do:

Skarvia forgets the token. Mirroring stops immediately.
Every file already written to your Dropbox stays exactly where it is. Disconnecting never deletes your manuscripts.
Documents pointed at Dropbox show as disconnected until you reconnect or send them somewhere else.

The same holds at the far end: deleting your Skarvia account removes what Skarvia stores, and leaves the files in your own Dropbox untouched. That is the point of the whole arrangement.

Updated 2026-08-12 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?

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