Synchronizing WoW addons and user configuration using Dropbox

I wrote this howto because I play World of Warcraft in two computers: my desktop at home (a Windows machine) and my laptop (a Mac) when I'm playing while travelling. I wanted to find a way to synchronize my addons and user configuration between the two computers, in order to avoid having to manually install and upgrade addons, and reproduce the configuration in the two machines.

The solution I came up with uses Dropbox. Dropbox is a free software that will make online backups of a specific directory in your computer; you can put important files there and they will be automatically backupd, and you can retrieve them or recover them from the Dropbox website. If you have Dropbox installed in two or more computers the files inside that directory will be synchronized between all the machines -- this is what we want to do with our addons and configurations.

The first thing you need to do is get a Dropbox account, if you still don't have one. Dropbox has a free account with 2GB of space, but if you use this referer

https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTEyNzc1Nzk

we'll both get an additional 250 MB. You'll need to install a program that runs on your computer (Mac, Linux or Windows). By default it will create a directory called Dropbox. All files you put in this directory are backed up online, and can be accesed on the Dropbox website, or on any other computer that has Dropbox installed and configured for your account. The Dropbox directory also has a special Public directory, where files placed can be acessed by other people through the browser.

After Dropbox is installed and running, you need to move your files to inside the directory. For the addons you should do something like this on the command prompt (cmd.exe):

move "C:\Users\Public\Games\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns" "C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\My Dropbox\"

(Replace User with your username.) On a Mac you should do this instead:

mv "/Applications/World of Warcraft/Interface/Addons" ~/Dropbox

Now make a link in the WoW directory pointing to the files in the Dropbox:

mklink /D "C:\Users\Public\Games\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns" "C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\My Dropbox\AddOns"

Or, on the Mac:

ln -s ~/Dropbox/AddOns "/Applications/World of Warcraft/Interface/AddOns"

This way your addons will be actually stored in the Dropbox, but WoW will see them in the correct location. Do the same for your account configuration; for Windows:

move "C:\Users\Public\Games\World of Warcraft\WTF\Account\User" "C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\My Dropbox\"
mklink /D "C:\Users\Public\Games\World of Warcraft\WTF\Account\User" "C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\My Dropbox\User"

(Replace User with your WoW username.) For the Mac:

mv "/Applications/World of Warcraft/WTF/Account/User" ~/Dropbox
ln -s ~/Dropbox/User "/Applications/World of Warcraft/WTF/Account/User"

Do this on the main computer on which you play WoW -- the one with all addons and configured to your liking. Next, for each other computer that you also play, remove the two directories that are going to be sync'ed, and replace the with a symbolic link pointing to the one in the Dropbox. Instead of removing the directory, it's better to create a copy so you can undo the process if anything goes wrong; for Windows:

move "C:\Users\Public\Games\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns" "C:\Users\Public\Games\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns.bak"
move "C:\Users\Public\Games\World of Warcraft\WTF\Account\User" "C:\Users\Public\Games\World of Warcraft\WTF\Account\User.bak"
mklink /D "C:\Users\Public\Games\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns" "C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\My Dropbox\AddOns"
mklink /D "C:\Users\Public\Games\World of Warcraft\WTF\Account\User" "C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\My Dropbox\User"

And for the Mac:

mv "/Applications/World of Warcraft/Interface/Addons" "/Applications/World of Warcraft/Interface/Addons.bak"
mv "/Applications/World of Warcraft/WTF/Account/User" "/Applications/World of Warcraft/WTF/Account/User.bak"
ln -s ~/Dropbox/AddOns "/Applications/World of Warcraft/Interface/AddOns"
ln -s ~/Dropbox/User "/Applications/World of Warcraft/WTF/Account/User"

This way, all your addons and configurations will all be kept synchronized between the computers that you use to play WoW. You'll only need to update the addons on one computer, even if you use Windows and Mac together, since the addons are platform independent.