Syncing Charm data between multiple machines

[tmcguire]

I use two machines for work, one desktop PC at my office and one laptop. Due to travelling and sometimes working from home, I have many weeks in which I use both machines. This means I run Charm from both machines. Right now, there is no automatic way to sync the Charm data between those two. I upload both timesheets at the end of the week, so lotsofcake has the combined result in the end.

The lack of syncing gives me the following main problems:

• It is hard to me to see how much time I've already worked, aka the "can I go home now" problem. As soon as the total in the time tracker window reaches my weekly work time, I'd like to drop the hammer and head home. Knowing the total is also important to avoid under- or overtime. Since the Charm instance on one machine is missing the data from the other machine, the total row is pretty much useless.
• Same for the total total time, I often need to know the total time spent on a specific project this week. This data is also useless when using two Charm instances.

The current workaround I use is to manually look up the numbers in the "My Worktime Query" on lotsofcake and then manually add those numbers to the time displayed in Charm's time tracker window. That is however time consuming and cumbersome. There is also a bigger issue with this, which is that it requires me to have uploaded the timesheet from the other machine already. This is not always possible, for example I might work Monday and Friday from machine A, and Tuesday to Thursday from machine B. Now, when I want to get the total amount of hours on Thursday on machine B, this requires me to have uploaded the timesheet from machine A already - but that is not correct, the timesheet for A is not complete yet, it will only be complete on Friday.

I'd say this is by far the single biggest problem I have with Charm.

[frankosterfeld]

The problem is that we can't just sync everything to lotsofcake because of privacy, we can only sync aggregated data. Björn Balazs had some ideas how to handle those in the UI.

[hackel]

This would really benefit me as well. I was looking into using Syncthing to sync the datbase, however Charm doesn't detect when the datbase file has changed on-disk and reload it, requiring a manual restart of the application. There is a serious opportunity for data loss here. Also if journal files are used, they could get out of sync and lead to corruption. I have just been rsyncing the database between machines manually whenever I switch, and (trying to) remember to close Charm on each machine when I am done using it. This works, but is obnoxious, and requires that both machines are online at the same time.

Even the ability to merge two existing DBs would be helpful.