Comments on: Syncing ‘Things’ Across Multiple Computers with Dropbox

By: Chris Coyier

Chris Coyier — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:18:31 +0000

I have the same problem for sure. You just gotta be careful to only have ONE or THE OTHER open at any given time, otherwise you’ll write over each other and lose stuff.

By: Clark Bennett

Clark Bennett — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:16:05 +0000

I am using Dropbox to sync Things on my desktop and laptop and it is working flawlessly. I’ve been careful to avoid having Things running on both computers at the same time because of the warnings on this and other websites – but – I don’t why that is necessary and hope someone can explain.

It seems to me that if the Things folder is in the Dropbox it will always be up to date (assuming a functioning internet connection).

Where am I wrong? Thanks.

By: Phil

Phil — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:08:49 +0000

I am using live.sync to accomplish syncing the two directories but really this approach is still very imperfect regardless of what is syncing the database.

If I forget to close Things on my home computer and I make a bunch of changes on my work computer, when I get home and try to close Things it updates it’s database and overwrites everything. Disaster!

By: JackJack

JackJack — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:20:48 +0000

I tried the DropBox sync thing…. and it was a disaster. I set the application to sync between two MacBook Pros. iPhone syncing was set up to one of the MBPs.

After i set up syncing on both computers, I rang THINGS on the first Mac and attempted to sync with iPhone. No changes. I turned the second Mac on to see what was going on. The data sets were out of sync. I turned the Macs off and checked the data on my iPhone and it too was a mishmash of old, new and olew (old+new).

Once burnt, second time sky!

My secretary uses THINGS to managed me, I suspect — tho she’d never admit it. Its hard to know when she has her Mac turned on and I travel for work. So its quite possible that she could be working in London while I log on at the same time 14 time zones away and presto! What do we have? Corrupted data!

We need a more perfect solution. Not unless I am missing something. (And, no, OMNIFOCUS is NOT it!)

By: Rhys Keepence

Rhys Keepence — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:25:18 +0000

@Sander – you can symlink the other way – create a symlink at ~/Library/Application Support/Cultured Code/Things to the real files in the Dropbox folder – this is useful for applications that expect data or preference files to be in a particular location.

By: Cameron Cundiff

Cameron Cundiff — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:49:54 +0000

Thanks for the clever solution. I was trying to use my iphone as bridge, syncing then pairing to my other system, to no avail. This works perfectly!

By: Chase Adams

Chase Adams — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:46:24 +0000

Sheer Genius.

By: Joe

Joe — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 09:57:09 +0000

You can also use the mac software called Expandrive and sync to your existing webserver or ftp space.

The only problem with this is that Things can be slow to open or simply not open at all if there is a problem with the speed of your internet access.

Hopefully Cultured Code ( the company that makes things) will be updating Things to sync across multiple computers (and also adding due dates to project tasks!)

Love this software and its almost 95% there!

By: Tomas

Tomas — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:13:36 +0000

I have never used Things but am a huge Dropbox fan and highly recommend it! BTW, you can’t use an alias to sync folders outside of the Dropbox folder in OS X, but you can definitely use a symlink. ;)

By: Pip

Pip — Sun, 24 May 2009 12:20:07 +0000

Hmmm. I wonder if the dropbox sync across multiple computers combined with Things’ new team management function would make it possible to use it as a sort of cloud-based collaborative project management tool.

What I mean is, if you made a point to always assign tasks to a team member (adding yourself as a team member) you could have multiple users ticking things off/adding them to the shared database.

I imagine the primary technical difficulty would be that Dropbox can’t be made to work realtime, so if you had multiple users making changes to the database, you’d encounter problems.

Also, there’s the not insignificant issue of this model lacking project leadership/permission management.