Under consideration

:bulb:

Sync across multiple PCs using services like Google Drive and Dropbox

You cannot currently sync Foreground across multiple PCs because one of the reasons I had for making it was to make sure that tracking data was private and secure on your PC, and not available to me or anyone else.

However, I have been thinking about a way to opt in to syncing across devices. Essentially, you’d choose the cloud-storage folder of your choice on your PC, whether that’s Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, whatever, and each PC running Foreground would write a unique copy of its database there, and the others would read each database and merge all entries. In this way, each version would have the full set of records across all PCs. As an added benefit, then you could turn on syncing to Exist on any one of these PCs (and one only), and it would sync totals from all PCs.

I’m not entirely sure of the easiest way to do this with SQLite, but if there are no extensions or tools for it, there’s nothing stopping me from just doing it with SQL.

I am very happy to take feedback on this approach and hear alternative proposals!

1 vote

Tagged as New feature

Created 08 October by Josh Sharp

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  • 08 October Josh Sharp created this task

  • avatar

    Thanks for adding this task, Josh!

    I have Foreground installed on my home laptop and my work laptop, and I currently sync Productive and Neutral time from work only and Gaming from home only.

    I was able to install Foreground on my work laptop only because I work in IT; most people at my work don’t have admin rights to their work laptops for security reasons. That said, I don’t have native access to my personal OneDrive or Google Drive from my work laptop, and that’s not something that IT Security is likely to budge on. So, the shared cloud storage option wouldn’t work for me, unfortunately, although I’m probably an outside case.

    I work in data modeling and visualization, not app development, but any ideas I’ve had about how multiple instances of Foreground could sync to Exist without overwriting would likely require more rework than it’s worth.

    Saturday