Advanced Options

Profiles

All of your SyncPlaces settings are stored together in a profile. You can export this profile, and add or import other profiles and quickly change between them. For example you may have different profiles pointing at different servers, or pointing at different sets of bookmarks (maybe for synchronising two different folders e.g. one for work bookmarks, one for home bookmarks):

Click on the 'Add' button to create a new profile with a default name. As the list of profiles is editable, you can change the default name that appears to something more meaningful. Once you have finished editing a name move the cursor out of the drop down for it to permanently change. Note: You cannot have two profiles with the same name. New profiles automatically inherit all the settings of the last profile in use to make it quicker to set up new profiles.

To change between profiles simply select the one you want from the drop down and all the associated settings will be loaded. Depending on the differences with the profile you are replacing, the timestamps used for merging and the hashes used for send/receive may be reset affecting any merging when next synchronising (see the first tip for more info). Also if you use any of the automation options, then you may have to restart your browser for them to take affect.

Use the 'Move up' and 'Move down' buttons to change the order of your profiles in the list.

To delete a profile just select it from the drop down and then click the 'Delete' button.

You can export the currently selected profile using the 'Export' button. This will save all of your settings in an external file with the exception of the '...folder to backup to', as this is O/S dependant. Note that your SyncPlaces passwords are stored in plain text in this file, so ensure you keep it safe.

When you import a profile with a new name this name will be added to the drop down just like the others. But if the profile's name is already in the list, all the settings of that profile will be overwritten by the ones imported.

XBEL

On this tab you can enter styling tags that will be added to the top of the XBEL file when exported or sent to the server. Then when you open the XBEL file with your browser it will be transformed and styled as described by these tags and displayed appropriately. This is great for remotely accessing your bookmarks.

As an example, first enter the following tag into SyncPlaces: <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="xbel.xsl"?>

Then download this zipped package of files, unzip them into the same folder as your XBEL file, open up the XBEL file in your browser and they will be nicely styled. Note: The files originally come from one of the old Bookmark Synchronizer extensions, were given away freely, but do not contain any copyright message and the associated sites are now dead (even the wayback machine couldn't help), and the authors uncontactable. So if you know who the original author(s) were please let me know so I can credit them here.

The 'Export/Send small XBEL' option gets rid of all the extra XML that is used to store keywords, tags, annotation etc. when synchronising. The XBEL file produced is much smaller and ideal for transforming using XSL or importing into non-Mozilla browsers. This option is only available if you synchronise using JSON and choose to 'Send XBEL' as well

Encryption

The first item on this tab is the password required to encrypt/decrypt passwords/bookmarks that are synchronised and when backing up/restoring passwords. This must be entered or the synchronisation/backup/restore will fail.

You can choose between two different encryption systems when encrypting your passwords or bookmarks. AES or TEA. TEA is much faster than AES and is the default. But even TEA is quite slow with large files as it is all being done in Javascript (newer browser releases should help with this).

If you are encrypting your bookmarks using AES, then you can select the level of this encryption using the 'Bits for encryption' option. The greater the number of bits used, the harder it will be to decrypt them. However, it will take much longer to encrypt and decrypt when using 192 or 256 bits.

Workarounds

Warning: The options on this tab are only normally of use if you are having problems. Using them when you do not have any problems may cause SyncPlaces to stop working or side-effects to occur.

Details of what these options mean are provided in the appropriate places on the Support page.