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.