What happens if my computer goes offline?

Recording continues. The minutes queue up on your own machine and are sent in order once the connection is back.

What keeps working while the connection is down

• The timer runs and a record is still written for every minute of the shift.
• Screenshots are still taken at the interval your organization set, and they wait next to the record they belong to.
• Clocking out works. The closing record joins the queue like any other.
• Starting a shift does not work. Clock-in waits for an answer from the server, so it needs a connection.

Where the records wait

They go into a file on your own computer. Screenshots and application icons are written as separate files next to it, so a long outage does not turn the queue into one enormous document. A record leaves the queue only after the server has accepted it, never before.

What happens when the connection returns

1. The app empties the queue once a minute.
2. Up to 20 records go up per round, oldest first.
3. If one record is refused, the round stops there and the next one starts a minute later. The order is kept.
4. Accepted records are removed, and their screenshots are removed with them.

Twenty records a minute means a full day of queued minutes clears in roughly an hour.

Watching the queue

The Queue tab in the desktop app shows what is waiting: how many records there are, the oldest of them grouped by hour with time, application name and size, and when the last successful upload happened. Retry now runs one extra round without moving the regular schedule. While the app is offline the screen says so and says that nothing is lost.

The limits worth knowing

• A record that is still refused after 25 attempts is set aside and is not tried again. The Queue tab counts these separately instead of hiding them.
• The queue holds 20000 records. Past that, the oldest are dropped.
• If the app cannot write to disk, records are held in memory and the Queue tab warns about it. Those are lost if the app closes.

The queue is emptied on purpose in one case only: when the server is switched from the advanced settings. The confirmation says how many waiting records go with it, because those records belong to the old server.

Which app runs on which computer is covered in the desktop app comparison, and the contents of one of these minute records in what Worktivity collects.