Syncing Things between several Macs using Dropbox
Please note: This article has been contributed by a user.
Using Dropbox you can easily keep your Things in sync between multiple computers. Just set up each computer with access to a shared Dropbox and proceed similar to using a portable drive on Syncing Things on multiple Macs (FAQ).
Make sure, though, that you do not have Things running on multiple computers at the same time, because Things won't notice an update of the database file while it is running, and will keep using the database it had loaded at launch. Fortunately, at least, you won't lose changes made on a different computer that way, because Dropbox will detect the conflicting database files and make a backup of each. If that happens, you'll have to merge the differences manually, somehow, e.g. comparing and editing the xml files in the database folder.
This could trivially be solved by CC adding a lockfile in parallel to the Database.xml file. The lockfile could contain the hostname of the machine currently running things and the PID of the process. When things quits cleanly, it destroys the lockfile.
When things starts up, it could check if the .lock exists - if not, continue, if so the tree is simple:
- If the lockfile hostname is the same as the machine hostname, Things crashed or something likely went wrong, but it's safe to delete the file and start up normally.
- If the lockfile contains a different hostname, warn the user, ask them if they want to proceed (delete the lockfile) or stop and quit things on the other machine.
