Chapter 5 · Where Your Work Lives
Connecting Google Drive
Google Drive works the same way Dropbox does, with one difference worth understanding before you start: Skarvia can only ever see the files it created itself. This chapter covers the handoff, the folder layout, and the reconnect prompt that catches people out.
Connecting it
Two doors, same destination:
- From your Account page, under the storage section: Connect Google Drive.
- From inside the editor, by choosing Google Drive in the storage dialog before you have connected. A Connect button appears in the dialog.
Google asks you to approve the connection, then sends you back where you started. Starting from the editor returns you to that document rather than to the account page.
As with Dropbox, the token carrying you through the handoff is short-lived and expires after ten minutes. Leave the Google screen open too long and you land back on your account page with an error rather than a connection. Click Connect again and go through without pausing.
Skarvia asks Google for offline access, so it can refresh the connection quietly instead of sending you back through the approval screen every hour.
What Skarvia can see
The connection uses the drive.file scope. That grants access to files the application created, and to nothing else. Your existing documents, your shared drives, and every folder you had before are invisible to Skarvia. There is no setting that widens this, and the boundary is enforced by Google.
One consequence is worth stating plainly, because it surprises people: Skarvia cannot open a manuscript you already keep in Drive. To bring existing work in, use the Import button inside a project (Part VIII), which reads the file you upload. Drive storage is for documents Skarvia writes from here on.
The access token is encrypted where it is stored.
Where your files land
Paths are relative to your My Drive, and the storage dialog proposes a
Skarvia/ folder for you. Skarvia creates any folder in the path that does not exist
yet, so you can type a structure rather than building it in Drive first.
| Path you set | What appears in My Drive |
|---|---|
Skarvia/My Novel/Chapter 1 | Skarvia/My Novel/
containing Chapter 1.skarvia.json and Chapter 1.txt |
The .skarvia.json file is the full document Skarvia reads back. The
.txt is plain text you can open in anything, now or in thirty years. If you leave
the folder part empty, Skarvia files the document under Skarvia.
Chapter files
Alongside the document, Skarvia keeps one plain-text file per detected chapter in a folder
named <document> chapters. A document called
Chapter 1 gets a companion folder called Chapter 1 chapters beside it.
These are maintained rather than accumulated: rename or remove a chapter in your draft and the matching file is deleted from Drive on the next sync, instead of leaving an orphan behind.
The naming differs slightly from Dropbox, which uses a .chapters suffix. If you
have used both, do not expect the folders to look identical.
When it syncs
Skarvia pushes as you write, on save, throttled to at most once every ten seconds for any one document. Choosing or changing a document's storage destination pushes immediately, as does reconnecting an account that had fallen out of touch.
The chip in the editor's status bar is the honest answer to whether your last few sentences have reached Drive.
When Drive asks you to reconnect
If a document's storage state reads disconnected, Skarvia could not get a working token. There are two causes, and the second is the one nobody guesses:
- The grant stopped working. Access was revoked from your Google account, or the refresh stopped being accepted. Ordinary and easily fixed.
- The file was created under a different OAuth client. Because
drive.fileonly covers files the application created, a file written by an earlier incarnation of the connection cannot be edited by the current one. Google answers with a permission error, and Skarvia deliberately reports this as disconnected rather than as a generic failure, because the useful action is the same in both cases.
The repair for both: connect Google Drive again from your Account page. Reconnecting does more than restore the token. Every document sitting in a disconnected or error state is pushed again at once, so work that never reached Drive catches up by itself without you visiting each document.
Nothing is lost while the connection is down. Skarvia still holds your working copy and still takes version checkpoints, as Chapter 3 describes. Only the mirror into Drive is paused.
Disconnecting
Account page, then Disconnect Google Drive.
- Skarvia forgets the token and mirroring stops immediately.
- Every file already in your Drive stays where it is. Disconnecting never deletes your manuscripts.
- Documents pointed at Drive read as disconnected until you reconnect or send them elsewhere.
Deleting your Skarvia account behaves the same way: it removes what Skarvia stores and leaves your Drive files untouched. If you would rather keep your work somewhere without an app boundary around it at all, Chapter 4 covers Dropbox, which gives Skarvia one folder of its own instead.
Updated 2026-08-12 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?