World of Warcraft - How to Cloud/Sync Addons and Settings

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Balrog
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World of Warcraft - How to Cloud/Sync Addons and Settings

Postby Balrog » Sun May 12, 2019 12:24 pm

This guide will explain how to cloud your WoW addons and settings, and sync them across multiple PCs using Dropbox and symbolic links. This will work with any version of WoW - old or current.

Disclaimer: Although this was written in 2019, I am still using Windows 7, so I cannot 100% guarantee that this will all work as expected in Windows 10. As far as I know, though, it should.

Before you start, you need to make a Dropbox account if you don't already have one, and you need to install Dropbox on every computer that you have WoW installed on. You need to know the locations of your WoW folder and your Dropbox folder on your hard disk. You can move your Dropbox folder wherever you like in the Dropbox settings. I suggest moving it somewhere that's easy to access, like C:\Dropbox.

To make this guide easier to write, I will assume that your WoW folder is C:\World of Warcraft and your Dropbox folder is C:\Dropbox, and that these are the same on all of your computers. If they are in different locations, you need to remember that and use the correct paths instead of my example ones. The capitalisation of the folder names shouldn't matter in Windows, but I recommend copying my capitalisation just to be safe.


Once you have all that figured out, you need to follow these steps on the machine that contains the addons and settings that you want to be synchronised to the other machines . . ,

1. Navigate to your Dropbox folder and create a sub-folder called World of Warcraft.
2. Enter this sub-folder and create two more sub-folders within it called Interface and WTF.
3. Move the Addons sub-folder from C:\World of Warcraft\Interface to C:\Dropbox\World of Warcraft\Interface.
4. Move the Account sub-folder from C:\World of Warcraft\WTF to C:\Dropbox\World of Warcraft\WTF.
Dropbox will now start clouding the files from these folders, which will take a while because, although they are small files, there are a lot of them. You can continue with the guide in the meantime, as the files are already in place on this computer.
5. Navigate to C:\World of Warcraft\Interface, click into the address bar of the file browser window and enter cmd to open up a command prompt window using this folder as its current folder.
6. Enter:

Code: Select all

mklink /d Addons "C:\Dropbox\World of Warcraft\Interface\Addons"

Note: CTRL-V doesn't work in Command Prompt, but you can paste this in by right-clicking the window and clicking Paste.
7. Close the command prompt window, navigate to C:\World of Warcraft\WTF and, once again, enter cmd in the address bar to bring up the command prompt in this folder.
8. Enter:

Code: Select all

mklink /d Account "C:\Dropbox\World of Warcraft\WTF\Account"



Now you should have everything clouded in your Dropbox and WoW fooled by symbolic links into thinking these folders in your Dropbox are actually in its own folder. To get your other machines to share these clouded files, first start them up and wait for Dropbox to finish syncing everything, and then follow these steps on each of them . . .

1. Delete the Addons sub-folder from C:\World of Warcraft\Interface.
2. Delete the Account sub-folder from C:\World of Warcraft\WTF.
3. Navigate to C:\World of Warcraft\Interface and enter cmd in the address bar to bring up the command prompt in this folder.
4. Enter:

Code: Select all

mklink /d Addons "C:\Dropbox\World of Warcraft\Interface\Addons"

5. Close the command prompt window, navigate to C:\World of Warcraft\WTF and enter cmd in the address bar to bring up the command prompt in this folder.
6. Enter:

Code: Select all

mklink /d Account "C:\Dropbox\World of Warcraft\WTF\Account"



The reason for only syncing the Account sub-folder of WTF, and not the entire WTF folder, is that it will prevent certain system settings, such as screen resolution, from being synced. If you are using the same resolution and other settings on all the PCs involved, you may prefer to sync the whole WTF folder. Alternatively, you might prefer to sync only one of the account sub-folders if you only want to cloud your own settings and not the settings of other people using the computer.

Something else worth noting is that your Dropbox folder doesn't even need to be on the same drive as your WoW folder. I have WoW installed on my SSD (drive C:) and my Dropbox, containing my WoW addons and settings, installed on a hard drive (drive D:).

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