How to Keep the Same Notes Everywhere – Synchronizing Tomboy with Dropbox

The other day, I wrote about a free note taking application called Tomboy. As I mentioned there, Tomboy is now available for Linux, Mac and Windows. Since I frequently move between machines and jump in and out of Linux and Windows, I wanted to have the same notes in all places.

After some research, I found out that I could set Tomboy to use a local folder to synchronize notes. I am an enthusiastic Dropbox user and I have it installed on every PC that I use. To me, the next logical step was to point my Tomboy sync at Dropbox so that I was getting the same notes on all my PCs, no matter what system was running.

Here’s how it’s done.

If Tomboy is running, you can access the preferences by a right click to it’s system tray, or from the “Search All Notes” windows under “Edit – Preferences”.

Make sure the pull-down menu is showing “Local Folder”, then hit the “Browse” button to choose a folder on your PC. Naturally, in this case, we will choose a folder inside of the Dropbox folder so that the files will get synchronized by Dropbox.

Once you have the folder selected, be sure to hit the “Save” button to save the folder path.

Now you only need to do this on every PC that you have Tomboy installed on and you’re ready to go. Whenever you need to update your notes, you can find the “Synchronize Notes” command in the systray icon right click or in any note window under “Tools”.