Migrating Alfred Clipboard to New Laptop

Published by in Alfred, Productivity at https://preview.rmoff.net/2019/08/07/migrating-alfred-clipboard-to-new-laptop/

Alfred is one of my favourite productivity tools. One of its best features is the clipboard history, which when I moved laptops and it didn’t transfer I realised quite how much I rely on this functionality in my day-to-day work.

alfred clipboard

Whilst Alfred has the options to syncronise its preferences across machines, it seems that it doesn’t synchronise the clipboard database. To get it to work I did the following:

  1. Shut down Alfred on both machines.

  2. On the source machine go to ~/Library/Application\ Support/Alfred/Databases/ and move clipboard.alfdb and clipboard.alfdb.data to Dropbox

  3. Make sure Dropbox is running and has sync’d the files to the target machine.

  4. On the target machine create a symbolic link:

    $ ln -s ~/Dropbox/Alfred/Databases/clipboard.alfdb ~/Library/Application\ Support/Alfred/Databases/clipboard.alfdb
$ ln -s ~/Dropbox/Alfred/Databases/clipboard.alfdb.data ~/Library/Application\ Support/Alfred/Databases/clipboard.alfdb.data

    If the location of the files on your Dropbox is different then modify the ln paths accordingly.

  5. Restart Alfred on the target machine.

Note
 This was a one-time migration; I don’t know if it works bi-directional because Alfred would be running when the SQLite clipboard.alfdb got updated. If you try it and it works then let me know and I’ll update this post.

Robin Moffatt

Robin Moffatt works on the DevRel team at Confluent. He likes writing about himself in the third person, eating good breakfasts, and drinking good beer.