Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How Do I Share My Database Between Two or More Macs?
A: The easiest way to do this is to use a product called Dropbox. Dropbox allows you to share files over the internet, syncing only the changes necessary to keep the files the same.
To do this, the first thing you want to do is download and install Dropbox on every Mac you you plan to have the shared database on.
Next, you want to pick a primary Mac, and then copy your existing MacGourmet3Database file to your new Dropbox folder.
Once that’s done, you want to change the database location used by MacGourmet to be the new Dropbox location you just accessed. To do this, open your MacGourmet Advanced preferences and select the Dropbox folder that contains your shared MacGourmet3Database file.
After doing that, and quitting and restarting MacGourmet, you should now be using your database from the shared location on this Mac. You now want to do the same thing on your other Macs, but you don’t have to copy your MacGourmet3Database file to your Dropbox folder, it should already be there once you log in to your Dropbox account.
The one caveat to sharing your data this way: While syncing the database file, you don’t want more than one copy of MacGourmet running. When MacGourmet is running, it expects to be the only application modifying it’s database. If Dropbox modifies something in the background, there is no way for MacGourmet to know that this is happened, so data could get corrupted.
Best practices when using Dropbox for syncing? Only have one copy of MacGourmet running at a time, and make sure Dropbox has finished syncing any changes before launching it. This should prevent any problems and allow you to use MacGourmet and the same data on more than one Mac.
You can also (as of MacGourmet 3) keep your MacGourmet3Database file on a shared local disk, but please be aware: the application always expects to have access to its database file, so bad things can happen if the shared disk goes away unexpectedly. Usage with a shared disk will also be slower, depending on your network speed, than using a local copy, or something like Dropbox.
You can’t use an iDisk for your MacGourmet3Database hosting. From what can be ascertained, they use some kind of load balancing that results in MacGourmet not always getting the exact version of the database that is expected, which results in odd behavior and even corruption.
