How to sync your GNote notes using Dropbox

This trick can be used to sync other things too. However, here we will use it to synchronize our GNote notes in all the compus in which we have GNote and Dropbox installed. If this mini-tutorial seems a little complicated to you, you may prefer to use it directly Google notes from your desktop.

Install Dropbox and GNote

Installing GNote is bullshit, as it is found in the repositories of virtually all popular distros. In the case of Ubuntu and similar, you just have to type in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install gnote

Dropbox is a cross-platform file hosting service in the cloud, very similar to Ubuntu One. The service allows users to store and sync files and share files and folders with other people.

To install Dropbox, download and install the package corresponding to your distro from the page Get Dropbox.

These steps need to be repeated for every compus.

Next, create your (free) Dropbox account. This will give you 2GB of space to store your files on the Dropbox server.

Sync folders

Here comes the trick. What we are going to do is create a Gnote folder in the folder that you keep in sync using Dropbox, in this case ~ / Dropbox /. Next, we'll copy the contents of ~ / .gnote /, which is the folder where all your notes are stored, to the newly created folder. We delete the ~ / .gnote / folder and "replace" it with a symbolic link that points to the ~ / Dropbox / gnote / folder.

That way, when GNote looks in ~ / gnote / the notes, it will be redirected to ~ / Dropbox / gnote / and since this folder will stay in sync (as long as you have Dropbox open), your notes will stay in sync. 🙂

mkdir ~ / Dropbox / gnote
cp ~ / .local / share / gnote / * ~ / Dropbox / gnote /
rm -r ~ / .local / share / gnote
ln -s ~ / Dropbox / gnote / ~ / .local / share / gnote

It is necessary to repeat these steps (minus the second one) in all the compus.

The biggest drawback of this little trick is that, although we will be able to see our notes from the Dropbox site, being in XML format, it will not be possible to see them correctly using the web browser. They will have to be downloaded and opened with Gnote.