Storing Your Yojimbo Library on Dropbox

In my piece on backups earlier this week, I mentioned that I wasn’t storing my Yojimbo library on Dropbox. A bunch of Yojimbo users emailed me to tell me you can do it, and you can even use it for syncing a shared Yojimbo library between multiple Macs — if you’re careful never to run Yojimbo from more than a single Mac at a time. I don’t like having to be careful, so, personally, I wouldn’t use Dropbox with Yojimbo for syncing — but it’s worth noting that Yojimbo attempts to detect this situation, where you’ve left it running on machine A and launched it on machine B, and warns you accordingly.

However, in my case, I only ever access Yojimbo from one machine. I want to use Dropbox to store my database for off-site storage and backup. And, indeed, it seems to work just fine. You move your ~/Library/Application Support/Yojimbo/ folder inside your Dropbox folder, then create a symlink in ~/Library/Application Support/ pointing to the new location. (You have to use a symlink; an alias won’t work.)

★ Thursday, 18 March 2010