Valhalla Island

YoJimbo is my auxiliary brain. After spending a long time trying to persevere with an outdated and buggy Schoolhouse I decided to switch to the tried and true YoJimbo to also handle my notes and assignments from university. My new computer setup involves two computers, a big iMac and a tiny PowerBook. I need to sync YoJimbo notes between them and there is just the tool — .Mac was made for this situation and YoJimbo has built-in support for it.

If it worked it was a perfect solution, flick the on switch and completely forget about it. My YoJimbo data would just be consistently mirrored across computers and I wouldn’t even have to think about what it was doing. Problem was that it didn’t work.

While I was testing, everything else was syncing perfectly — iCal calendars, Transmit favourites, Safari bookmarks but YoJimbo would fail or appear to work but wouldn’t. This was extremely frustrating, while I’ve grown to love everything else’s perfect syncing at the time all I’d bought .Mac for was YoJimbo syncing. I resorted to what I don’t do very often at all, I contacted Bare Bones support.

They were extremely helpful, patient and ultimately solved the problem. I want to share the solution they provided but I have to make it extremely clear that they told me to do this after I had sent them my personal log files so it may be customised to my specific problem and may not work for you. Use it at your own risk and always backup. That being said, if it does fix issues you’re having with YoJimbo, I’d love to know.

Here’s their instructions:

On each of your Macs

• Quit Yojimbo and all other apps which employ .Mac syncing (Address Book, iCal, etc).

• Turn off syncing in the .Mac panel of System Preferences, and close the System Preferences app.

• Issue the following three commands in the Terminal to halt synchronization and delete your local sync data:

killall SyncServer syncuid

mv ~/Library/Application\ Support/SyncServices/Local/ ~/Desktop/

killall SystemUIServer

From any one of your Macs

After you’ve finished removing the local sync info from each of your Macs as described above, on any one machine, please issue the following two commands in the Terminal.

[NB: each command must be entered as a single line, and you'll need to enter your .Mac account password when prompted]

/System/Library/CoreServices/dotmacsyncclient --removedcs --username jimwhimpey --dataclasses com.barebones.yojimbo.yojimbodata

/System/Library/CoreServices/dotmacsyncclient --listdataclasses --username jimwhimpey

Ed: Use your .Mac username in place of “jimwhimpey”.

On each of your Macs

After you’ve finished the above, you’ll need to reconfigure your .Mac sync settings as follows:

• Bring up the .Mac settings panel

• Turn the “Synchronize with .Mac” option back on, and choose a sync period of “Every Hour”

• Close the .Mac settings panel

• Launch Yojimbo

• Reopen the .Mac settings panel and select the applications (including Yojimbo) whose info you want to synchronize.

• Turn the “Synchronize with .Mac” option off, and then back on

• Close the .Mac settings panel

Restarting syncs

Once you’ve completed the above procedure on each of your Macs, choose whichever machine has the “best” data and start a manual sync from that machine via the .Mac system prefs panel.

When you do this, you will be asked how to handle the info for each of the apps you’re syncing, and you should choose the option to merge your info; for Yojimbo in particular, you will also be shown a second dialog in which you must choose to allow Yojimbo to sync your data.

Then, as each of your other Macs syncs–I recommend that you perform a manual sync once on each machine to “kickstart” the process–you should be prompted for how to handle the sync on each, and you should choose the option to merge your local data with data from .Mac.

Once you’ve finished doing the manual syncs, regardless of whether things catch up immediately or not, please wait at least overnight for the scheduled syncs to take place, and let me know what happens.

My Results

Immediately after completing the instructions it still didn’t work. Like they suggested, I left both computers on overnight, letting them automatically sync every hour. I’d forgotten about it by morning and ended up taking some notes at school with YoJimbo. When I got home, the new notes had synced with YoJimbo on the iMac — It worked!

It has worked ever since, completely flawlessly. I think that perhaps the biggest problems was trying to manually create a realistic syncing situation when I was initially trying to test out if it worked. The trick might be to just turn it on then go about your business.