Keeping all your notes in sync with Dropbox and Tomboy

Posted on April 17, 2009 by Michael Schurter

Tomboy is a wonderful note taking program for Gnome. It has some synchronization features built-in, but not everyone has a server to store their notes for synchronizing between multiple computers.

Enter Dropbox: a service for synchronizing files between computers. It works great in Gnome (Windows and Mac OSX as well).

I use Dropbox for synchronizing my Tomboy notes by telling Tomboy to synchronize to a Local Folder: ~/Dropbox/Tomboy

My one gripe is that you have to go into a note to synchronize. Someone has filed a bug and submitted a patch, so hopefully it will be fixed soon.

This entry was posted in GNU/Linux, Mono/.Net, Open Source, Technology and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.
  • http://www.afruit.com A.Fruit

    I’ve been using dropbox as well. Love it. I use it a lot for sending large files to clients (as a “click-to-download” link). Works slick.

  • http://www.churchmedia.net/forums/general-computer-and-software-discussions/41762-tomboy-notes-now-cross-platform.html#post267231 Tomboy Notes now cross platform – The Church Media Community

    [...] systems. Although Tomboy supports syncing notes through various methods I’ve also found this tutorial to sync Tomboy notes through Dropbox. Having used Evernote for note taking and a sticky note [...]

  • Washburnello

    If you want seamless automatic synchronization for tomboy just symlink your .tomboy folder into dropbox. This is a fabulous way to keep notes backed up on the cloud side and sync with laptop/desktop because it syncs when you make a change.

  • Travis

    Washburnello: Wish that worked. I tried linking .tomboy -> Dropbox/tomboy but tomboy doesn’t seem to notice when a change is made to the on-disk file.

    It overwrites any changes made by another machine.

    Hopefully tomboy will auto-sync in the near future.

  • Washburnello

    Hmm… maybe I haven’t tested it enough to tell. It’s seemed to work correctly for me. I just symlinked .tomboy to Dropbox/.tomboy and then on my Desktop I made a symlink called .tomboy in my home folder that pointed to /Dropbox/.tomboy. But like I said, maybe I didn’t test it enough or maybe I’m just lucky ;)
    Thanks for the response BTW.

  • http://michael.susens-schurter.com/blog/ Michael Schurter

    The latest dev version has support for directory watching (that is: live updates/syncing).

    See the news entry for 0.15:

    http://projects.gnome.org/tomboy/

    I think there’s a blog post on it somewhere out there.

  • Travis

    Excellent! I’m running the dev version but failed to see the directory watching plugin.

    Thanks

  • Paul

    UbuntuOne has a facility which supports Tomboy, which means that not only can you sync across machines with online storage, but it also means that you can access (read/write/etc) your notes through a web browser – which the Dropbox method doesn’t really allow.

    I use both Dropbox (for general files across multiple platforms) and UbuntuOne (exclusively for tomboy notes).

  • http://tutorialsmad.com/ Asho

    is it possible to install tomboy in windows… i don’t have linux…