Sync Dopus Configuration

Help & Support
1

I have 5 dopus licenses and I would like to share the configurations across all installs. How can I go about doing this?

-Kareem

2

You may need "Symbolic Links" point to /dopusdata and link to a Sync tool

3

There is no automated config sync (maybe one day) but you can do it manually via Settings > Backup & Restore.

The configuration is also all stored in normal files, so they can be copied between machines. But note that some files are only read when Opus starts and potentially only written back when it exits, so parts of the configuration aren't suited to automatic syncing while Opus is still running.

When using Settings > Backup & Restore, everything will be written to disk first, of course.

4

Thanks for the responses. Seems like Backup & Restore is the preferred way of getting this done. Any way this can be automated (maybe through scripting)?

5

The Prefs BACKUP command can be used to automate the Backup & Restore process.

It would still only let you overwrite one PC's config with another's, though. It wouldn't let you merge the newest parts of both configs together or anything like that, if changes had been made on both sides.

6

Any news about this?

I cannot imagine myself with a USB drive to sync my configuration. I’m new to Directory Opus, and I’m customizing it bit by bit on different machines. I’m scared to lose a piece of configuration or create a conflict if I forget to export from one machine then import on another.

I’m maintaining a dotfiles repository, but I cannot sync my configuration by this mean, since Directory Opus’ configuration files are:

  • numerous,
  • changing often (sometimes without any action from me – in the first minutes of use, at least),
  • not documented (or I couldn’t find it – a search on a completely random file name shellprops.oxc returns no result in the official documentation for instance),
  • difficult to understand when I observe their changes. For example, changing the Horizontal scrolling from Manual scrolling with automatic adjustment on folder changes to Manual scrolling only changes /prefs/flags[@settings5] from 0x600000020002000 to 0x600000820002000 in Directory Opus/ConfigFiles/prefs.oxc,
  • containing personal information sometimes. Therefore, I cannot blindly add all files in %APPDATA%\GPSoftware\Directory Opus to my dotfiles. For instance, %APPDATA%\GPSoftware\Directory Opus\ConfigFiles\prefs.oxc contains in /prefs/smtp/email the e-mail address that I used to buy Directory Opus (which is different from my Github public e-mail address).

Modern softwares like Jetbrains IDE family, VS Code, Firefox, Chrome, allow to sync their settings across devices.

7

I'm also using dotfiles to sync DOpus settings between devices with dotbot.

Here's how I set it up:

  • dotbot creates a symlink from ~/dotfiles/dopusdata to ~/AppData/Roaming/GPSoftware/Directory Opus/
  • All files of DOpus's /dopusdata (alias) folder are in the dotfiles repo; just some are excluded using .gitignore, based on what seemed to better not be synced, see below.
  • I excluded files with
    • secrets (except /prefs/smtp/email, which is in prefs.oxc that can't really be excluded. However, I don't use the email setting anyway.)
    • GUIDs and other identifiers that seem to be unique per Windows installation
    • binary data (no idea what those contain, and whether they're unique per device)
    • Settings and data that I want to maintain separately per device, e.g., Favorites, Smart Favorites, and the default lister settings.
      • I created a hard link from the actual ConfigFiles/favorites.ofv to ConfigFiles/favorites-device1.ofv, to still have a backup in the git repo. However, that's not used by DOpus directly. Hard link was created using mklink /H favorites-device1.ofv favorites.ofv. I did the same for Layouts/System/default.oll.

I did set that up a couple of days ago, and so far it works well to sync settings. I always Exit DOPus before performing git pull.

The only thing I realized is not synced are the "favorite preferences" you can set in the preferences view, i.e., the feature to pin preferences to the top of the preferences view. Those might be stored in /dopuslocaldata or /dopusglobaldata, which I do not sync currently.

I'd also like to see an update of HOW TO: Backup or locate your Opus configuration (Advanced), as it seems incomplete (and outdated?).

My .gitignore:

# contains secrets
ConfigFiles/ftp.oxc
ConfigFiles/proxy.oxc

# contains guid
ConfigFiles/archives.oxc
ConfigFiles/exploreroverride.oxc
ConfigFiles/shellprops.oxc

Formats/shell.off
Formats/system.off

# binary data
Formats/system.bin
dopus.dat

# local data
ConfigFiles/favorites.ofv
ConfigFiles/smartfav.osf*
Layouts/System/default.oll

# other files
userdata.omd

# directories
Collections/
Logs/
Themes/
UISpacings/
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