Backing Up
It is recommended that you make regular backups of your Category and Things To Do data, which is stored in the ToDo X preference file:
~/Library/Preferences/com.nomicro.ToDo.plist
From your home folder, open the Library folder, and within that the Preferences folder. You should see the file there among numerous others, although the “.plist” suffix may or may not be visible depending on your Finder settings.
If the Library folder is not visible in your home folder, there are a number of ways to access it. For example, choose Go To Folder… from the Finder’s Go menu and enter ~/Library.
As an alternative to backing up the preference file, the application offers an option to perform a data backup automatically after every change. Each backup generates a file named for its creation time:
~/Library/Application Support/ToDo X/Backup/com.nomicro.ToDo-timeA.plist
This contains all of your Category and Things To Do data, but no application preferences. Such files are suitable for a later Import; however, they should not be used to replace the preference file, as doing so would revert all of your ToDo X preferences to their factory settings.
In lieu of automatic backups you can perform backups manually by means of the File/Backup (⌘B) menu item. A file created in this way is distinguishable by a name ending with “B” rather than “A”.
Whether created automatically or manually, only the most recent 10 data backups are retained. This limit is arbitrary and can be overridden by means of a hidden preference as described in the FAQ.
Several kinds of files can be imported. You can do so either by choosing Import… from the File menu and selecting the file of interest, or (in most cases) by simply dragging it to the application’s dock icon.
You can import data from another user’s to-do list or from a backup copy of your own.
You can import to-do items from Calendar/iCal, or from any other application that produces an industry-standard “.ics” data file. Calendar data can be found in your ~/Library/Calendars folder, or if not directly accessible there, can be exported from the Calendar application to a .ics file.
Importing a calendar’s Info.plist file from ~/Library/Calendars will automatically import all of the associated .ics files.
You can create a to-do list from a text file, where each line of the file consists of either an item name or an item name and notes separated by a tab character. Plain text files encoded in UTF-8, ASCII or Mac Roman should generally work, but UTF-16 or RTF is best when special characters are involved. (TextEdit lets you choose a plain text file encoding when saving.)
You can import to-do items from early versions of the Stickies application, one per sticky note. Choose Import… from the File menu, navigate to your Library folder and select the file named “StickiesDatabase”. (It is probably best not to do this while Stickies is running.) Notes are converted to plain text, discarding any formatting, links and embedded images.
More recent versions of the Stickies application store sticky notes as rtfd file packages in the sandbox folder ~/Library/Containers/Stickies/Data/Library/Stickies.
You can import data from Ambrosia Software’s classic Mac OS “ToDo!” desk accessory. Typically, this file will be named “To Do! 3.0 File” and will be found in your Mac OS 9 System Folder.
You can use drag & drop (or copy & paste) to import data from other applications. For example, you can select a list of files in the Finder and drag them to the main ToDo window, or to the notes in an Edit window. Text clippings, web location files, browser bookmarks, iTunes tracks, Calendar events, email addresses, contacts and ordinary text can also be imported in this way.
If you are using Apple’s Mail application you can drag an email message into ToDo X to create a link to that message.
You can drag (or paste) categories or to-do items into a rich text document in, say, TextEdit. The results will be formatted using your current set of printing options and font choices, so you can choose whether or not to include to-do item notes, for example.
You can drag (or paste) categories or to-do items into a plain text document to create a list of unadorned names.
You can export to an (old, obsolete) iPod using the (old, obsolete) companion application ToDo X to iPod Notes.
Embedded within ToDo X to iPod Notes is a command-line tool named ToDoPlistToText that will export your data as tab-separated UTF-8 text. Because this may still be useful for those with command-line and scripting experience, it has been made available as a separate download at the aforementioned link. This should be considered a temporary measure.
Other export capabilities have been deferred to a future release. In the meantime, if you are desperate to extract your data you could try examining the preference file. Depending on the release of macOS you are running, this will be in either XML or binary Property List format. Such files can be manipulated with the plutil and defaults command-line tools, or Apple’s Xcode developer tools.
Caution: The location and format of the data is subject to change in future releases.
It might be helpful to know that each entry in the Categories array has a numeric ID, and each entry in the Items array has one or more IDs that indicate the category or categories to which the item belongs. While the data keys used for Categories should be self-explanatory, the keys used for Items are not; they were shortened in order to reduce the size of the preference file somewhat. Refer to the following table for details.
Key | Value |
---|---|
Na | The to-do item name; always present. |
No | Notes for the to-do item; absent if there are none. |
Pr | The item’s current priority; always present. |
P1, P2 | The item’s original and previous priority; may be absent. |
Mk | Alternate priority marker; may be present for a completed item. |
Ca | Array of category IDs for the item; always present. |
D1 | The item’s creation date; always present. |
D2 | The item’s last modification date; may be absent. |
Caution: The location and format of the data is subject to change in future releases.