Remote Data Access sync issue

SUGGESTED

I have had 2 instances at a client on v28 where they were told their data was out of sync. The PC that reported the issue proceeded to UPLOAD the data to the cloud. Everyone then had to resync and the data was out of date. Surely if this error occurs on one machine, it is better to DOWNLOAD a fresh dataset from the cloud, which will be up to date, and allow everyone else to continue working?

  • 0
    SUGGESTED

    This is actually by design. Sync issues can occur for numerous reasons, including ones that are beyond our control e.g. a temporary loss of Internet connectivity on one client and 'offline' changes are made to the data whilst other clients remain connected and also makes changes.

    With the improvements to RDA in v28 if a client on RDA encounters a sync issue that cannot be automatically recovered from the user will be offered a choice on how to resolve it. You can either choose to keep the changes currently in the cloud and potentially lose changes you might have locally, or to keep your local changes, push those to the cloud and potentially lose changes there. Choosing the latter option means that any other clients connected to the data via RDA will need to 'rebase' to ensure they can correctly get back in sync.

    The reasoning behind this is that we can never know what data is the most important, and therefore which to keep. One set of data has to lose to be able to resolve the sync conflict. No one site has any more priority than any other one anymore so the best (only) thing we can do is ask you which side should win. This change in approach to site priority meant we could open up significant usability improvements for clients using RDA, including the ability to upgrade data from any site and the ability to use any connected service from an site - both significant limitations in v27 and earlier.

    It's worth noting that the conflict resolution dialog that is presented explains the repercussions of either choice, and a backup is generated before the data is 'rebased' (in either direction) so it is always be possible to access any data that may have been 'lost' as a result of the conflict resolution. Also, if you have reasons why you do not want certain users to be able to force their changes to be pushed to the cloud as part of conflict resolution we added an explicit permission for this so you can remove this from those users and in the conflict resolution dialog they will not be offered the choice to keep their changes and can only chose to download from the cloud. A backup of the local data will still of course be created before the rebase happens.

  • 0 in reply to Darron Cockram

    This was not the user experience they encountered. They tried to login to Sage and got a sync error. They had the choice of work offline or take a back up and watch the data get uploaded to the cloud. It seems me to that the set up is more complex than what you have portrayed. This issue is causing serious processing delays. The reliability of RDA seems to be lower after the upgrade. My clients are not happy. 

    There was no indication that a back up was created automatically and that would be useless anyway as it is the same data that is forcibly uploaded

  • 0 in reply to Ken Fillmore

    Yes, I had omitted to mention the 'continue to work offline' as that is really just a kick-the-can-down-the-road choice. It does not resolve the sync conflict, and in fact the longer you run without resolving the conflict the worse things will become as the data will diverge more and more.

    The backup is in place because data would be lost by replacing the data locally with that in the cloud, or vice vera, One side has to lose in the case of a conflict so the backup means data is never truly lost and could still be recovered if necessary. The data must be different in some way or there is no sync conflict.

    There is no dialog in the application that offers forced upload as the only choice that I am aware of. If users are seeing something like this could you ask them to take a screen shot please? If you could then share the screenshot we could investigate/advise further. Thanks.