Dropbox
Introduction
Many people wish to synchronize Mafia across multiple computers. They find it helpful to use the same counters, scripts, builds, etc regardless of where they are in the world. It can certainly be nice to know that your settings, such as the location of your last semi-rare are remembered by mafia regardless of you being at work or home.
A popular and effective solution is to share mafia settings by running it on Dropbox or a flash drive. Since Dropbox has nearly every advantage possessed by the other, without needing to actually remember to take it with you, we'll discuss Dropbox. These same lessons can be used to run mafia from your flash drive, with just a little ingenuity.
Dropbox is a program found at http://www.dropbox.com/ which will share a designated folder online. It uploads the contents of that folder to its website for free. 2 Gig of free storage is provided, so don't worry about the size of your mafia installation. Any other computer that also installs Dropbox (and logs on with your password) will synchronize all files in the dropbox folder. No other folders or files on your computer will be shared, so it is not a security risk.
Installation
First, download Dropbox and install it to your hard drive. It will prompt you for a location to designate as your Dropbox folder. The default location works fine. Any other location works fine also.
Next, download mafia to your Dropbox folder. You might want to put it in Dropbox/kolmafia. This works just like downloading mafia to any other location that you want to run it from.
Sharing Settings
If you're using Windows, then you're done! When you run mafia it will create a bunch of subdirectories just like it always does. Dropbox will share those subdirectories and their contents with your other computers online. Easy-peasy!
Unfortunately if you're using Linux or a Mac, then it isn't quite that easy. Those systems do not keep settings stored in the same location as the program. You'll need to set up symbolic links to trick them into saving their data in the Dropbox folder.
Creating Symlinks
Linux users are expected to be familiar with the command line interface, so it should be easier for them. For Mac users some more detailed instructions will be provided. Replace /path/to/dropbox/folder/ with the actual path to your Dropbox folder.
- Linux
- Open the command-line interface and type in:
- ln -s ~/.kolmafia /path/to/dropbox/folder/KoLmafia
- Mac
- Open the command-line interface and type in:
- ln -s /Library/Application\ Support/KoLmafia /path/to/dropbox/folder/KoLmafia
- In case those instructions for the Mac made no sense, instructions will be provided step-by-step.
- Open Terminal.app. This is in /Applications/Utilities, or you can just use Spotlight to find it.
- Open Finder, and navigate to the folder containing your Dropbox folder.
- In Terminal, type "cd ", then drag the Dropbox folder onto the Terminal window, then press Enter.
- Leave the quotes out for all of these commands and make sure to include the trailing space. Copy-pasting the commands is advised.
- In Terminal, type "ln -s /Library/Application\ Support/KoLmafia KoLmafia", then press enter.
- You now have a symbolic link, and Dropbox will back up your mafia settings files.