How I Sync Application Preferences through Dropbox | Hacker News Reader

How I Sync Application Preferences through Dropbox

logan.dk

24 pointslogandk9 comments

Why not just move the Preferences folder to your Dropbox then make a symlink?

This should work as well, however I found that I only wanted to synchronize settings for a few apps. Some apps have settings, which you’d like to have different between systems.

You can symlink individual application preference folders rather than the entire preference folder.

Also some apps let you specify where their preferences folder is located by holding down the option key when you launch them. Then you can set them to use a folder in your dropbox.

Is there a reason why everyone recommends moving the folder and then putting a symlink in its original location? Seems cumbersome.

I don’t move the folder, I just put a symlink in the Dropbox folder. That seems to work great, am I doing it wrong?

– edit: Ah, I just had a epiphany. I only have one computer, I use Dropbox for backup and to occasionally access one file or another when I happen to have to use friend’s computer, not to sync several computers. It makes total sense to put the “original” files into Dropbox and to put symlinks on the individual computers if what you want to do is syncing, not backup. Is that right?

Ya, I'm almost certain that's right.

"The Launch Agent is installed by writing the following into this file:"

Which is then followed by a file name.

So what is the following? Are we supposed to put the file name/path inside the file itself? Does "this file" mean something other than the file that follows immediately after the paragraph? Maybe "this file" means the file that was mentioned above, and the file path (below) is "the following" which should be written into the first file? The wording could be improved.

Thanks, hereby corrected.

You're gonna love DesktopCouch: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktopcouch

AFAIK Ubuntu is looking at putting that in their Ubuntu One cloud service.

I've been using dropbox + symlinks to sync dotfiles and app preferences across 3 computers for a year now. Works like a charm.

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