February 14, 2007
ComicBase Tip of the Day:
Sharing a Database Between Computers
In honor of Valentine’s Day, today’s tip is about sharing—that is, sharing a single ComicBase Database between two different computers.
If you’ve got ComicBase 9 or later and a home network, it’s a piece of cake: just put your database in a shared folder that both computers can see. Then, just File > Open that database and you’re good to go.
ComicBase automatically remembers the last database either computer opened, so it’ll open it automatically whenever you launch ComicBase again from either computer. If the shared folder becomes inaccessible, however, you’ll need to manually choose which database you want to open when you launch ComicBase.
If you don’t have a home network set up, you can still “sneakernet” the database between the two computers by doing a File > Save A Copy and saving your database onto a USB flash drive (1 GB or larger recommended, although 512MB will do in a pinch). On each computer, just tell it to File > Open the database file from the flash drive. So long as you make sure to insert the flash drive before launching ComicBase, you should only need to tell it to do this once.
Bonus Tips for Successful Sharing
- Give your shared database a different window color (File > Window Color) than the default Blue. This will make it instantly obvious if you ever get mixed up and start using the default database on the machine instead of your shared database.
- Use Setup > Preferences and change your backup settings on both machines to save all backups to a specific folder (e.g. C:\Program Files\Human Computing\ComicBase 11) instead of to the location of the original. This will ensure you’ve got an independent backup on each computer, instead of one shared backup, and will buy you important insurance against data entry mistakes, hard drive failures, and the like.