Same instance on two computers

[paatric]

I have a desktop and a laptop. When I used one of them and entered data in Trilium I used to be able to just copy the Trilium-Data folder to the other computer and just run Trilium. Now the data seem to be personalized to a computer. Is there a quick fix, change a parameter or do I need to do the servervariant as the only option? I use Linux Mint

[dosubot[bot]]

You can still use the same Trilium data on two computers by copying the data folder, but you need to make sure both instances are pointed to the same data directory path. Trilium is not personalized to a specific computer—its data directory is chosen based on environment variables or standard OS paths, and there’s no hardware binding involved (source).

The recommended way is to set the TRILIUM_DATA_DIR environment variable on both machines to the location of your copied data folder. On Linux Mint, you can do this by running:

export TRILIUM_DATA_DIR=/path/to/your/trilium-data
trilium

Or, add the export line to your .bashrc or edit your desktop shortcut to include the variable (source). Make sure Trilium is closed before copying the folder, and copy the entire directory (including trilium-data.db, attachments, etc.).

If you want real-time sync or multi-device access, the server variant is more robust, but for manual transfers, setting the environment variable is the quick fix. Just be aware that manual copying does not handle conflicts or sync changes automatically.

To reply, just mention @dosu.

---

^{How did I do? Good | Irrelevant | Incorrect | Verbose | Hallucination | Report 🐛 | Other}