How to transfer TweetDeck settings between two computers

Posted on April 22, 2009 at 5:29 am

Lately, I’ve been using Twitter quite a bit and my favorite program so far for Twittering is TweetDeck. TweetDeck is cool because it’s sleek looking, it’s fast, and it has a lot of nice features like URL shortening services, groups, filtering, etc.

One problem I ran into quickly, though, was the fact that I wanted to use TweetDeck on several computers. I currently have 5 to 6 groups and a couple of other settings that would be a royal pain to setup over and over on new installs of TweetDeck.

move tweetdeck settings

It would have been perfect if they had an Import/Export function in TweetDeck to easily move all your settings, configurations, etc, but they don’t! So how can you move all your TweetDeck settings to another computer easily?

Well it’s actually not that hard. Just about every Windows program stores all their config data one of two places: the registry or the user profile. Thankfully, TweetDeck stores the custom groups and other settings in your user profile.

To find it, go to the following location on your computer:

C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\TweetDeckFast.[large number]\Local Store

Note: Some installs of TweetDeck may be located in \Application Data\Roaming\TweetDeckFast instead of the path mentioned above.

Inside that folder, there should be two files:

preferences_username.xml

td_26_username.db

transfer tweetdeck settings

All you have to do to move your TweetDeck settings is to first install the program on the second/third computer and then go the same folder on the other computer and paste these files (overwriting the originals).

Make sure to close TweetDeck when you paste the files into the Local Store folder. After copying the files, open up TweetDeck and all your settings, groups, etc will be there!

The only downside to this is that you still have multiple installs and if you change anything on one, such as setting up a new group, you will have to copy the files over again! Not really sure if there is a way to get all installations to look at one set of files, but that would be very cool!

If you know how, please post a comment! Enjoy!

» Filed Under Computer Tips

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Comments

11 Responses to “How to transfer TweetDeck settings between two computers”

  1. Michael Risser said on : April 22nd, 2009 at 8:44 pm

    Thanks for a great post.

    If you’re running TweetDeck on a Mac, replace C:\Documents and Settings\{username} with /Users/{username}/Library/Preferences/


  2. smartfathers said on : April 23rd, 2009 at 12:33 pm

    You could us Windows Live Sync on all pc’s to keep the preference folder in sync and never have to do it manually. My 2 cents.


  3. Kyle Kilzer said on : April 23rd, 2009 at 1:46 pm

    Perfectly timed.

    I needed to do exactly this today. This’ll save me some time.


  4. fatherb said on : April 23rd, 2009 at 3:31 pm

    is there a way you could keep them in sync with dropbox?


  5. Robin van rijn said on : April 23rd, 2009 at 3:47 pm

    Thanks for the tip. I have 2 macs. One for my office and one for my macbook being able to have the same settings on each is going to be useful.


  6. Jay Cosnett said on : April 28th, 2009 at 5:22 pm

    FWIW, These files are somewhere else all together under Vista. I found mine in:

    C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\TweetDeckFast.[large number]\Local Store\


  7. Simon said on : May 5th, 2009 at 12:35 pm

    And if you are on Ubuntu….

    /home/{username}/.appdata/TweetDeckFast.[large number]/Local Store/


  8. Dan said on : June 10th, 2009 at 3:32 pm

    Great post, just what I was looking for. Have just tweeted about it too ;-)


  9. Kel said on : July 15th, 2009 at 7:16 pm

    You should also be wary of the files under c:\uses\username\appdata\roaming\adobe\air\tweetdeckfast blahblah.

    I was trying to uninstall & reinstall tweet deck, and kept finding it was keeping my settings even though I’d removed the settings from the tweet deck location mentioned in the article.

    That directory I’ve specified was for vista as well.


  10. Mart said on : August 27th, 2009 at 6:56 am

    Thanks for the info,

    The one in Vista on adobe air seems it is in another ELS folder, at least for me, C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\AIR\ELS\TweetDeckFast.[large number]


  11. Juile said on : November 30th, 2009 at 12:40 pm

    Thanks very much for the help! I wrote to TweetDeck and they never were that precise! I sincerely thank you for that. Good week!


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