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Sync Things eas­ily between Macs

I recently decided to leave my favorite GTD / ToDo appli­ca­tion iGTD because of lack of devel­op­ment. It took me few weeks to choose between the most pop­u­lar replace­ments on the Mac, Omni­Fo­cus and Things. In the end Things won. At least this round.

Maybe I didn’t think it all through because right after my deci­sion I stum­bled upon the Things Wiki that although you can sync to iCal and iPhone, sync­ing between two or more macs is not sup­ported yet.

User con­tributed infor­ma­tion states that you can do this with either iDisk and me.com ser­vice or by using Drop­box. I started read­ing the iDisk infor­ma­tion. I have been using me.com (for­mer mac.com) ser­vice from the time it started (sigurarm@mac.com) but I have to say, that although I like it a lot to host my pic­tures, sync my iCal cal­en­dar and more, it is very slow for me. I have read com­plaints from Europe users about the speed but never really got into the dis­cus­sion why this is so slow. So I ruled iDisk out.

On the other hand, I use Drop­box too. Drop­box is sim­i­lar to the iDisk in that a cen­tral­ized server some­where out there makes a copy of every­thing you put on it and if you open your account on another com­puter you will have a copy there too. In the case of Drop­box it’s a folder called Drop­box on all your macs which is syn­cronized. And it does it quickly.

The deal is not bad: 2GB space for this use for free. Next option is a bit steep, about $10 a month, but that is for 50GB’s. The free deal would do for most who are only think­ing of sync­ing Things.

Another user con­tributed file tells how to use Drop­box for sync­ing, but it didn’t work for me. Maybe I messed some­thing while try­ing to make a sym­bolic link. Not sure. So what is one going to do?

Cul­tured­code says also on the Wiki that: “Choos­ing a web based loca­tion like iDisk is not pos­si­ble.” Well, I just found out that this is not exactly true.

So here is the way I do this:

1. Get a Drop­box account. It’s free and easy to set up. Here is a refer­ral link https://www.dropbox.com/ which will give me some extra Drop­box space, but if you rather not want me to get that you can use the reg­u­lar URL.

2. The data­base Things uses, called Databse.xml is located at <home>/Library/Application Support/Cultured Code. What I did was to make a folder inside the Drop­box folder called Library. In there I made a Appli­ca­tion Sup­port folder and inside it a Cul­tured Code folder.

3. Move your cur­rent Database.xml file over to the Cul­tured Code folder inside the Drop­box folder. I rec­om­mend that you make a backup copy first, just in case. I know I don’t have to tell you to make sure Things is not open, but I am not say­ing I could not do such a stu­pid move myself.

4. Now, hold down the Option key and launch Things. It will ask you what Library (data­base) it should use. You will now select the one inside Drop­box.

5. When you go over to your other mac which you have already installed Drop­box on too, you will find that the whole folder struc­ture you made before is already vis­i­ble there. You then open Things on that mac hold­ing the Option key down and point to the Cul­tured Code folder inside the Drop­box. You should only have to do this once on each mac.

Just remem­ber to have only one Things open using the data­base at the time.

This was easy wasn’t it? I have not tried this with the iDisk but I can’t see why it should not work the same way there. If you like to try, sim­ply back up your data­base (don’t be a stu­pid) and make a new one to exper­i­ment with. Put in one or two tasks and see if it syncs.

Happy sync­ing your things … err, Things!