sync

Cyberduck recently removed a particularly useful piece of information from their wiki regarding the sharing of bookmarks because it is no longer compatible with the sandboxed variant of Cyberduck available from the App Store. It is, however, still compatible with the Windows and OS X download available directly from its website.

To setup bookmark sharing between Cyberduck clients (works with both OS X or Windows), simply create a folder in your cloud sync folder and then point Cyberduck to it.

On OS X, open a Terminal and execute:

On Windows, press Super+R (Super is the key with the Windows logo on it) to open the "Run" dialog, and enter %APPDATA%. Next, open the Cyberduck.exe_Url_[some_garble]\[Version]\user.config file and modify the config file to add the new parameter:

edit 2021-04-30: Cyberduck has since upgraded to use MacOS's app containerization feature, so this hidden preference no longer exists. However, you can still sync bookmarks - you just need to symlink the "Bookmarks" folder that now lives under the app container path (see the Cyberduck FAQ) to an external directory, e.g. one in your Dropbox or Google Drive:

With Apple's changes surrounding iCloud, managing media on iOS devices has become much easier and it is no longer absolutely bound to a single computer. However, I have still found it tricky to sync a single iOS device with multiple computers (different iTunes libraries) without having to entirely wipe the device first.

I synchronize my iTunes library between two computers regularly, so both machines have up-to-date copy of all media files. Furthermore, I set them up with the same username (but different hostname), so the iTunes media file paths are identical between machines.

Searching Apple forums revealed this solution by turingtest2: apparently, each iTunes library is assigned a randomly-generated "library ID". This identifier is stored on the iOS device, so if it doens't match when connecting to a new computer, it will request to wipe the device before proceeding with the sync. Simply copying my entire ~/Music folder from one machine to the other was enough copy all the iTunes metadata (including the library ID) and my device now happily synchronizes on either machine. For those wanting to save time and not copy their entire ~/Music folder, see the forum post for the exact files you'll need to copy.

In previous version of OS X, the iSync application could be used to reset sync history. This technique often resolved a bunch of miscellaneous bugs and sync-related problems. The iSync application has since been removed in OS X Lion and Apple's support documents aren't of much help. This one claims that resetting sync services can be performed from iSync in Leopard and from the Sync menu extra in later version of OS X. This document describes how to enable the menu extra in the MobileMe settings. Besides the fact that MobileMe is deprecate and no longer in use, the option described in that document to enable the Sync menu extra only appears after signing in to MobileMe... Which is deprecated.

Fortunately, there's a hidden folder you can open to enable any menu extra manually! Open Finder and select Go > Go to Folder (or press Command+Shift+G). In the prompt that appears, type: /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/. This should bring you to a folder with a bunch of menu extras that you can double-click to add to the menu bar. The one of interest in this case is Sync.menu, which should appear in your menu bar a second or two after opening it.

Once it's in your menu bar, hold Alt/Option and click on it to expose the advanced options and click "Reset Sync Services". After that's done, you can remove it from your menu bar if you'd like by holding Command and then clicking & dragging it out from the menu bar.