Good app, but support is weak

Final Draft is a nice app, and it does it’s job well. And if that’s as far as this review went, I’d give it 5 stars. I have knocked off two stars because of a surprisingly negative tech support experience.

FD9 has a ‘Backup’ command on its File menu, and it turns out to be pretty useful. I write just about every day, and I sometimes find it useful to go back to a screenplay in process as it existed several days ago—in some cases, I want to check something as it existed a month (or longer) ago. So, in addition to my current working draft, I keep daily ‘snapshots’ of a screenplay, which I create using the Backup command on the File menu.

The Backup command is disabled in FD9 by default, since the app does its own automatic backups. As long as auto-backup is enabled, the Backup command in the File menu does nothing. However, these auto-backups are stored in an OS X library folder that is very difficult to get to, so I prefer to create my snapshot files manually. According to the documentation, the Backup command is enabled when auto-backups are turned off in FD9’s preferences. And that’s the way it works in my old FD9 copy, which I had purchased directly from Final Draft Inc.

I have switched to a copy purchased from the App Store, and I couldn’t get the Backup command working. So, I contacted Final Draft for technical support. I explained my problem, and I was told in reply that I should use ‘Save As’ for making backups. I have previously learned from painful experience what a bad idea that would be. On more than one occasion, I have forgoetten to ‘switch back’ the ‘Save As’ to the name of my current working draft. The result has been that new work goes to the snapshot file, rather than the current draft—the dreaded “My work has disappeared!” That’s what makes the Backup command so nice—it doesn’t change the target file for saves.

I explained this as nicely as I could in a response email, and I was told again to use ‘Save As’. The email said that the Backup command was designed only to protect against a hard drive failure. That’s curious, since the command doesn’t do anything at this point, and the auto-backup feature saves backups to a file location the average Mac user probably couldn’t find. It has led me to the conclusion that the support rep had no idea why the Backup command isn’t working and tried to blow me off.

So, if one simply doesn’t understand how to use a basic feature of the program, I suppose the support team can do a decent job of addressing the issue. But if a user comes across an actual bug in the app, the support people simply can’t be bothered. And by the way, if Final Draft, Inc. is reading this review, the support ticket number is 3939496.

EKV SoCal about Final Draft 9