Running Evolution in Dropbox

After switching to Fedora several months ago I have been using the Evolution Mail client solely. I got away from my long-time friend Thunderbird over some rather ridiculous issues that I won't go into here. And so far, Evolution is great. And it integrates into the default Fedora 16 desktop beautifully.

My only gripe is when Fedora 17 is released I don't want to loose everything or spend mass amounts of time backing everything up for the re-install. (Or if something goes completely haywire with the linux kernel during an update.) So I mapped all of the Evolution data into my Dropbox folder. Here is how you can do the same thing.

Evolution stores basic settings and such in ~/.evolution/ and even though nothing of any real import is stored there, you still need to move it to Dropbox.

mv ~/.evolution/ ~/Dropbox/evolution

Now make a sym link to the default location for Evolution.

ln -s ~/Dropbox/evolution ~/.evolution

The main data files and all of your emails are stored in ~/.local/share/evolution so we need to do the same thing to that folder. I changed the name to evolution-data in my Dropbox but you can use anything you want.

mv ~/.local/share/evolution ~/Dropbox/evoulition-data/

And then make the sym link.

ln -s ~/Dropbox/evolution-data ~/.local/share/evolution

That is it. Now Evolution will save the files into the Dropbox folder and it will in turn be synced to the web. If you have crap loads of emails, like I do, then you might need to purchase the 50gb plan to deal with the space. For $9 a year it is definitely worth it.