Scattered Blog // Dan Cameron of Sprout Venture » Blog Archive » Sync Safari Bookmarks and History with Dropbox

Home / blog / Sync Safari Bookmarks and History with Dropbox

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

After setting up dropbox to sync 1password I thought “why not bookmarks?”. Well, OS X makes it easy.

What I’ve done is sym link the bookmark.plist and histroy.plist to drop box. Symbolic links work like this in the terminal,

ln -s [TARGET DIRECTORY OR FILE] [SHORTCUT]

Here are the two easy steps I used to sync Safari Bookmarks and History.

I created a Safari folder in Dropbox (found at ~/Dropbox/Safari).
Used the terminal to create the sym links (see below)

$ cd ~/Library/Safari/

$ ln -s ~/Dropbox/Safari/Bookmarks.plist Bookmarks.plist

$ ln -s ~/Dropbox/Safari/History.plist History.plist

Here’s a screenshot of the result.

To Sync, since it wont be done automatically. Just restart your browser.

Warning: I haven’t tested this extensively but it seems to work great. After a day on my work computer I just come home to restart webkit, the bookmarks then are updated..

Ryan Gaudet

Thanks a bunch for this. I spent about an hour searching for this exact solution. Nice and simple solution.

Ed Nieto

Hi Dan... I must be a dimwit because when I follow your instructions & type in the line "ln -s ~/Dropbox/Safari/Bookmarks.plist Bookmarks.plist", terminal reports back that the file already exists, even though when I look in ~/Library/Safari/ there is nothing there but the originals... no alias-linked files like you show in your screen capture ??!!
Any ideas ?

Thanks

2manydjs

Unfortunately this doesn't seem to work with Safari 4. The alias (or symlink) will be overwritten. Making a link to the whole ~/Library/Safari folder does work.

dancameron

I should update this post because I think the best solution now is foxmarks. It manages the merges and works great--even with Safari 4.

Post Details:

Related Entries: