Backing up, Importing and Exporting Data

 

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 preferences 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.

Importing

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 iCal, or from any other application that produces an industry-standard “.ics” data file. iCal files can be found in your ~/Library/Calendars folder or in subfolders of ~/Library/Application Support/iCal/Sources.

Importing a calendar’s Info.plist file 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’s “Save As…” lets you choose a plain text file encoding.)

You can import to-do items from 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.

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, email addresses, addressbook entries and ordinary text can also be imported in this way.

If you are using Apple’s Mail application you can create to-do items from selected email messages using the Mail to ToDo X AppleScript. As of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), you can simply drag an email message directly into ToDo X to create a link.

Exporting

You can export to an iPod using the companion application ToDo X to iPod Notes.

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.

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. It is neither documented nor supported for use as a standalone application, but may be useful for those with command-line and scripting experience.

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 preferences file. Depending on the release of Mac OS X 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 the Property List Editor from Apple’s 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 preferences 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.