Sync Your Camino Profile Via Dropbox
12:44 am, February 20th, 2009, Giles Turnbull
I’m not sure which this post is more in favor of: Camino (The World’s Best Browser) or Dropbox (The World’s Best Sync Thing), so let’s just say we love both of them and get on with it.
The marvellous Mac OS X Hints has a hint for Camino/Dropbox users everywhere: how to sync Camino via Dropbox. Which makes a great deal of sense if you use Camino on more than one machine.
Camino, like Firefox and other ‘zilla-based browsers, stores all its stuff in a profile folder on your hard disk. Normally that profile is buried in your Library/Application Support folder, but you can move it to your Dropbox folder and with a tiny bit of Terminal-fu, link the one place to t’other. Camino carries on its merry way, and any changes it makes to the newly-relocated profile are invisibly and promptly synced to your other machines thanks to the incredible magic of Dropbox.
I think this is the aspect of Dropbox that makes it so much more appealing than other sync services I’ve used in the past: Dropbox doesn’t act like an application, it acts like just another folder on your system. It works with and inside the Finder, no messing about, no having to remember to do anything (like click a button marked “Sync”).
It’s just a folder. But a MAGIC folder.
Posted by Giles Turnbull in News, Software | Comment on this article
2009 is my last year for my MobileMe (nee .mac nee iTools) account. Everything it offers can be done with free superior services such as Dropbox.
I am an extensive user of Tiddlywiki as a personal knowledge base and I was using my iDisk for that, but it was not as easy across computers and platforms as Dropbox. Dropbox even has support for Growl to notify you of changes that were made.
I have not use it for the Camino profile storage, though. That is certainly a good idea. I am looking at it as a solution for some other things, though.
I also signed up for LogMeIn as a replacement for BackToMyMac. While you don’t have the nice file sharing ease of use with the free LogMeIn account, you have a fast and responsive connection to a home Mac that makes BackToMyMac feel like it’s being routed through hot tar. Combine the ability to get a fast connection to your home machine with Dropbox and you don’t even need the file access capabilities, you just log in to your home machine and drag what you need to your Dropbox folder and POOF you’re done.
I am currently compiling a list of best services to replace all of the MobileMe services that I use (there are some I don’t use that I won’t really be looking for).
csbmonkey, on February 20th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Anybody know any reason why this wouldn’t work with Firefox too? No offense to Camino, but I can’t live without the Awesome bar anymore.
Juan Nunez-Iglesias, on February 22nd, 2009 at 10:32 pm