First thing is to make sure your computers have the same account name. Unfortunately, it has to be the name FIRST attached to the account so that the folder in C:Users… is the same. I have discovered that capitalization is not a problem (my folder name on my laptop is, for whatever reason, all lower case, but my desktop is capitalized).

If they aren’t already, put your pdfs in a folder on your cloud. I noticed the original author on this post tells Mendeley to copy .pdfs to a folder. I already keep all mine in one place and tell Mendeley to watch that folder. Either way, do that on the cloud.

Next, open Mendeley on whichever of your computers is better organized (or organize one of them), then hit ctrl + shift + D. A little debug window should open. Click ‘Open Data Directory.’ This should open the database folder referred to in the original post. With this open, CLOSE MENDELEY. Go up one folder level to Mendeley Ltd. Cut and paste the ‘Mendeley Desktop’ folder to your cloud. You can rename if it if you want. Make sure to cut it (rather than copy it), because creating a directory hard link creates a new folder.

Open command prompt as an admin. It should default to C:WINDOWSsystem32. If not, navigate there. Now you’ll create the symlink between the folder in you cloud, which contains your database info for Mendeley, and the original folder location. This way, when Mendeley accesses it and manipulates it, it will actually be working on the cloud.

The command follows the format:
mklink /J Link Target

where the Link is the ‘fake’ folder that will be set in the Mendeley directory, and Target is the real folder in your cloud directory. Also, note it is a forward slash in /J. Your final command prompt line should read:

mklink /J “C:UsersnameAppDataLocalMendeley LtdMendeley Desktop” “C:UsersnameOneDriveDocumentsMendeley Database”

This is, of course, dependent on which cloud service you are using and your actual file path. And whatever you name the database folder in your cloud directory (mine is Mendeley Database”). If there are any spaces (as there are in mine), it requires spaces. Remember that you removed the original ‘Mendeley Desktop’ folder in the Mendeley directory, and so this command creates a new one. If you did not remove it you will see an error.

Now go back to your ~/Mendeley Ltd folder. You should see a new ‘Mendeley Desktop’ folder, and it should appear to contain all the things that were moved to your cloud folder. You can reopen Mendeley to confirm that this was successful.

Next, do the same thing to your other computer, except instead of moving your Mendeley Desktop folder, just delete it (this is why I said start with your more organized computer). The command script should be identical, and you should now have the same database folder linked to the Mendeley directory on each computer.

I ran out of mendeley.com space and wanted to keep my desktop versions synced across platforms. I have already been saving all of my pdfs to Google Drive and I have a file folder structure, annotations, highlighting etc. I want to keep. Will doing the steps above completely screw all of that up? Thanks!

Now trying to find the SQLite command to view/edit content of db.

Also i cleared my .ds store files using Onyx.
Thanks!

I’m running El Capitan and ‘cd ~/Library/Application Support/’ runs as expected…