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.plistHere’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..
Thanks a bunch for this. I spent about an hour searching for this exact solution. Nice and simple solution.
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
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.
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.
very good solution! easy to configure!
I think the ln -s command is backwards… I get same message, but then I sounds like for Safari 4 there are better ways of doing it?
No, they aren't backwards… He just forgot to mention that first you have to copy the two original .plist files to Dropbox and delete them from their original location. Then the command will make SymLinks in the Safari folder pointing to the files on Dropbox.
But can xmarks sync history? I have MobileMe for bookmark sync… I am currently using the solution provided for syncing history but Safari crashes a lot and I'm wondering if that has something to do with it…
Oh wait, no. I think he did what I describe but that doesn't work (maybe it did in previous versions.) As @2manydjs says above, the links get overwritten. If you instead copy the whole ~/Library/Safari folder to Dropbox and then make a symlink to that as shown below, it will work.
cd ~/Library/
mv Safari/ ~/Dropbox/Sync/MacOSX/
ln -s ~/Dropbox/Sync/MacOSX/Safari/ Safari
I tried that trick under Snow Leopard 10.6.2 and it doesn't seem to work (Safari 4.0.3) It looks like Safari replace automatically the Symbol links with real files…
It works under Leopard with Safari 4.0.4.
Anyone has found a workaround?
Yea I've tried this many times and don't think it ever worked (I think I tried over a year ago with Leopard and whatever was current then, and I tried again last month in SL.) The only solution I've found is to sync the whole Safari Library folder (see my comment near the bottom of this thread – the one in reply to @James Saxon's reply to @Ed Nieto.)
It works fine like this.
I wonder if the similar procedure for bookmark synchronization on Dropbox could be performed on Windows using Firefox without any addons but purely Dropbox and Windows.
And yes, it is possible as Jon Fox's tutorial shows: http://jonefox.com/blog/2009/11/16/how-to-sync-…
I got it to work on SL 10.6.2 Safari 4.0.4, but on my power pc with OSX 10.4.11 and Safari 4.0.4, it does as you say– writes over the symbolic link file with a new Bookmarks.plist file, defeating the purpose. Any luck?
Since Safari 4.x doesn't allow for symbolic links, I created a small bash script that I run to sync my bookmarks with Dropbox. It's very simple: It compares the timestamps, and if the remote (dropbox) file is newer, asks you if you want to overwrite your local; otherwise, it copies the local to dropbox. bash script here: http://www.tempura.org/rants/2010/04/syncing-sa…
Hi there,
Is it possible to sync my entire browsing history from three years back?
Hi, i have a mac and window pc, in the window’s safari, how to map the bookmark to the dropbox??
I was going to tell you that this method wouldn’t work with Windows because Symbolic Links are a Unix thing and I thought there was no Windows equivalent, but it looks like there may be – check out the following utility which looks like it does exactly what this hint is doing: http://wiki.dropbox.com/DropboxAddons/DropboxFolderSync
It looks like the download link has been removed, but perhaps you can find it somewhere else with a little google-fu. Or if you are computer savvy then you might just check out the “MKLINK” command which looks like it can be used in place of our “ln” command.
It says this (and SymLinks in general) only works if you are using an NTFS formatted volume. If you don’t know what that means then I’d guess you probably are, unless you have a pretty old computer.
Hope this helps =
Have you heard about http://www.twohub.com also pretty neat utility to synch bookmarks online
Do I need to do this sym link to each of the Macs I want to synchronize?
Do I need to do this sym link to each of the Macs I want to synchronize?
Hi Dan, in not a computer genius and really need to access my bookmarks through dropbox from any other computer. Is following you steps the way to do this? Also can you please point me in the right direction of all the It jargon that you are talking about eg Terminal Bash? also I i am new bookmarks from my computer will they re sync straight into dropbox? Will this allow me to add bookmarks from another computer that uses internet explorer, that I can then aces from my computer at home?
Please help and thanks
I’m not the author of this tip, but I can tell you that this definitely won’t work across different browsers (or across different platforms.) If you just want bookmark sync, I’d recommend looking at xmarks.com