It is 10 days until wheels up for Lotusphere (#ls11), and I am finishing preparations of the laptop I will bring. After some headaches with dual boot (actually triple boot) between Windows XP and Ubuntu (this is material for a whole other blog entry!), I now have the operating systems running and most of the software installed.
I realized that I need a copy of all my Notes templates on the laptop as well, in case I have to make any changes/updates while at Lotusphere. So how do I synchronize the files between desktop and laptop? This is my solution:
I have a Dropbox account and have the software installed in both places. I created a folder in Dropbox called "Notes Templates". Then I installed Microsoft SyncToy 2.1 and installed it in both places. I set up a folder pair on each system, to copy the files between the Dropbox folder and the Notes Data folder. The settings in SyncToy let filter on extension and file attribute. So I selected to only copy .ntf files. But that would still include all the standard templates, and I don’t need them to take up space in my Dropbox account. So I told SyncToy to exclude read-only files, and I then marked all default templates as read-only on both sides. Now only the 25 templates I need access to are being synchronized. Mission accomplished. I am sure there is a smarter way to do this, but this works for me.
