Syncing Tomboy Notes Over SSH

Over the past couple of months I have started to really get into the habit of quickly dumping useful information or code snippets into Tomboy notes to save it for future use. I now use Tomboy for the majority of my note taking needs. I am very happy to get away from the notepad / gedit crutch. One issue that I faced is that I had some notes at home on my PC and other notes at work on my laptop. Thankfully, Tomboy notes has a nifty syncing feature that enables us to sync notes over SSH.

1. Create a directory on a server with SSH to host the notes

ssh tgeek@myserver.example
mkdir tomboy

2. Create an SSH key on each machine that you want to sync with and do necessary prep

ssh-keygen -t rsa
ssh-copy-id -i /path/to/keys/mynewkey tgeek@myserver.example

3. Download sshfs on each machine that you want to sync with

sudo apt-get install sshfs

4. Setup Tomboy to sync

4.1 In Tomboy, goto Preferences.
4.2 Click on the Add-ins tab and ensure that Synchronization -> SSH Sync Service Add-in is Enabled (if it is grayed out then it is disabled).
4.3 Click on the Syncronization tab.
4.4 For Service, choose SSH (sshfs FUSE)
4.5 Enter the credentials for your server that you setup in step 1.
ex. Server: myserver.example
Username: tgeek
Folder Path: /home/tgeek/tomboy
4.6 Click Save

I have this working in Ubuntu 9.10 and it is beautiful!

2 Responses to “Syncing Tomboy Notes Over SSH”

1. Rick Guyer says:

   March 18, 2010 at 1:21 pm

   Thanks for the tip! I knew Tomboy could sync via SSH, but I never thought to try it. You’ve inspired me with an idea that could bring Tomboy to mobile platforms.
2. Andy Cox says:

   February 10, 2012 at 3:45 am

   Thanks! Works really well Good tip and easy to follow, saving me a lot of time.