Fastest and Easiest Way to Sync Sites in FileZilla on your Mac via Dropbox

FileZilla So I’ve been a long time user of FileZilla and awhile back I looked into how to share my site list across multiple machines and one method many people were doing was storing their application settings on Dropbox by modifying their fzdefaults.xml to point to a location under your Dropbox folder.

I’ve been using that method for quite some time and it generally works well. I do hit into a couple issues.

  • Besides syncing just my sites, it also synced other application settings (e.g. window size, last location) and when you have monitors with different resolutions, it starts to become annoying.
  • I ended up with a file conflicts whenever I had FileZilla running on multiple machines at the same time. Typically it was filezilla.xml and queue.sqlite3 that would end up having conflicts.
  • Because fzdefaults.xml was stored in the Application (/Application/FileZilla/Contents/SharedSupport/) and not in the user settings (~/.filezilla/), whenever I upgraded FileZilla to the newest version, it would overwrite my fzdefaults.xml file and I would have to go and fix it every time.

What I decided to do instead was create symbolic links to the files I want to sync. The only 2 files I think that matter are bookmarks.xml and sitemanager.xml.

  1. Quit FileZilla.
  2. If you’ve created/modified fzdefaults.xml in the past, back up and delete that file.
  3. Create a folder inside your Dropbox folder to save your FileZilla settings to (e.g. ~/Dropbox/FileZilla/).
  4. Move your existing bookmarks.xml and sitemanager.xml that you want to share from ~/.filezilla/ to ~/Dropbox/FileZilla/. You may need to do this inside a terminal.
  5. Create symbolic links for those 2 files:
    ln -s ~/Dropbox/FileZilla/bookmarks.xml ~/.filezilla/bookmarks.xml
    ln -s ~/Dropbox/FileZilla/sitemanager.xml ~/.filezilla/sitemanager.xml
    Once again, you’ll need to do this inside a terminal.
  6. Start FileZilla and make sure everything is working.
  7. Create symbolic links similarly for the rest of your computers.