Two Machines, No Account

There is no account here, so there is nothing for us to sync. That is the whole design, and it has a cost: getting your work onto a second machine is your job, not ours. This page says exactly how to do it, and is honest about the one approach people ask for most, which does not work and cannot be made to.

The short answer

Put the folder you connected on the home page inside a folder that something else already syncs. Nextcloud, Syncthing, Dropbox, iCloud Drive, OneDrive, a network share, an encrypted volume on a stick: it does not matter which, because as far as this site is concerned the folder is just a folder on a disk. Everything you do here is written into it as an ordinary file the moment it changes, and whatever you use to sync picks it up from there.

On the second machine, open the home page, press the folder button, and point it at the same folder. From then on both machines are writing into the same place.

What that gets you, and what it does not

It gets you the files. Documents as Word files, spreadsheets as Excel files, presentations as PowerPoint files, the calendar as calendar.ics, contacts as contacts.vcf, each task board as a file of its own, notes one Markdown file per note, and the Record Suite's registers as CSV. Those are the real thing rather than an export, so they are useful on the second machine whether or not you open this site there at all.

The Workspace works from them. Docs, Sheets, Slides, Notes, Tasks, Contacts and Calendar open what is in the folder and save back to the same files, so the second machine opens with the first machine's work in them. A file changed there, or in Word or Excel on this machine, is read again when you come back to the tab. This needs Chrome, Edge or another Chromium browser on a computer.

The other tools only write. What the single tools keep in the browser stays in that browser; they put their results into the folder, and do not read them back.

Nothing merges line by line. When a file changed in the folder and the copy in this browser changed too, the app says so and asks which to keep, or keeps both side by side. It does not merge two sets of edits into one document, because there is no server watching both machines. Treat it as one machine at a time.

Carrying work across by hand

When the two machines are not on the same sync, Settings has the other route. Download everything as an encrypted bundle writes a single .obscura file holding every app's state, locked with a passphrase you choose, using AES-256-GCM with the key stretched from that passphrase. Move the file however you like, including through somewhere you do not trust, and restore it on the other side.

That one does carry the app state, not only the files, so the second machine opens with your documents, your notes, your task board and your settings exactly as you left them. It is a snapshot rather than a sync: the moment you restore it, the two diverge again.

Why there is no WebDAV or Nextcloud button

This is the request that comes up most, so here is the real reason rather than a roadmap.

This site sends its browser a Content Security Policy that ends with connect-src 'self'. That line means the page is permitted to open a network connection to exactly one place: back to obscuraos.com. Not to your Nextcloud, not to your WebDAV server, not to anywhere. It is enforced by the browser rather than by our good intentions, which is what makes the claim on the rest of this site checkable: open the network tab, use any tool, and see that nothing goes anywhere. A WebDAV button would require relaxing that line to let the page reach arbitrary servers, and the moment it is relaxed the guarantee is gone for every page on the site, not just the one with the button.

There is a second obstacle underneath the first. A browser will not let one site make requests to another unless that other site sends headers inviting it to, and a default Nextcloud, ownCloud or Apache WebDAV does not send them. So even with the policy opened up, it would fail for most people, and the ones it worked for would be the ones who had already reconfigured their server to accept requests from a website. That is a worse security posture than the one they started with.

The honest position is the one above: the folder is a folder, and your sync client is better at syncing than a browser tab could be. Nextcloud's own desktop client, Syncthing and the rest already handle conflicts, partial writes and machines that are asleep. Putting the folder inside one of them gets you a better version of the feature than a button here ever would.

A sensible arrangement

• One folder, inside your sync client. Not a folder that syncs and a second folder that does not; one, so there is never a question of which machine has the current copy.
• One machine at a time. Finish on the laptop, let the sync settle, then open the desktop.
• A bundle before anything drastic. Before clearing site data, changing browsers or handing a machine on, take the encrypted bundle from Settings. It is one file and it holds everything.
• Keep the folder out of anywhere you would not put the files. The folder holds your work in plain, readable formats, which is the point of it. It is exactly as private as the place you put it.

Sending work to someone else

Syncing is for your own machines. For somebody else's, KEYRING encrypts a file to their public key in the age format, which the age program on their machine will open. CAPSULE locks a file with a passphrase you tell them another way. LOCKBOX makes an encrypted note that opens in a browser without installing anything at all. None of the three involves an account, and none of them puts a copy on a server on the way.

Questions people ask

Where exactly is the folder?

Wherever you chose when you pressed the folder button on the home page. The browser remembers the handle rather than the path, so it may ask you to point at it again after a while, or if you moved it. Inside it you will find a Workspace, Sovereign Suite, Record Suite and Notes room, and a README explaining what is what.

Can I edit a file in the folder and see the change on the site?

Yes, for Docs, Sheets, Slides, Notes, Tasks, Contacts and Calendar, in Chrome, Edge and other Chromium browsers on a computer. Change a Word document in Word, go back to the tab, and Docs reads it again; put a new spreadsheet in the folder and it is in Sheets the next time you open Sheets. If you had changed the same thing here as well, the app asks which to keep. Anything a file holds that the app cannot read (a Word feature Docs does not have, an Excel function Sheets does not) is not kept when the app saves that file again. The other tools only write into the folder.

Is the folder encrypted?

No, and deliberately so: the files are plain Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Markdown, CSV and .ics precisely so that they outlive this site and open in anything. If the disk needs to be encrypted, encrypt the disk, which every operating system can now do, or keep the folder inside an encrypted volume.

What if I use a phone?

Phone browsers do not offer the folder API, so the folder is a desktop feature. On a phone everything still works and is kept in the browser; move work across with the encrypted bundle in Settings, or by downloading what you need.

Will you ever add real sync?

Not a hosted one. An account and a server is the thing this site exists not to have, and adding it would make every other claim on the site weaker. If sync arrives it will be between your own machines, with the keys held only by you, and it will say plainly what it can see.