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I have a simple offline html5/javascript single-html-file web application that I store in my dropbox. It's a sort of time tracking tool I wrote, and it saves the application data to local storage. Since its for my own use, I like the convenience of an offline app.

But I have several computers, and I've been trying to come up with any sort of hacky way to synchronize this app's data (which is currently using local storage) between my various machines.

It seems that chrome allows synchronization of data, but only for chrome extensions. I also thought I could perhaps have the web page automatically save/load its data from a file in a dropbox folder, but there doesn't appear to be a way to automatically sync with a specific file without user prompting.

I suppose the "obvious" solution is to put the page on a server and store the data in a database. But suppose I don't want a solution which requires me to maintain apps on a server - is there another way, however hacky, to cobble together synchronization?

I even looked for a while to see if there was a vendor offering a web database service - where I could, say, post/get a blob of json on demand, and then somehow have my offline app sync with this service, but the same-origin policy seems to invalidate that plan (and besides I couldn't find such a service).

Is there a tricky/sneaky solution to this problem using chrome, or google drive, or dropbox, or some other tool I'm not aware of? Or am I stuck setting up my own server?

user364902
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  • I didn't try, but it may be possible to read a data file from the local filesystem using ajax if you launch Chrome with the `--allow-file-access-from-files` flag. Also, this wouldn't be 100% offline, but it's worth checking out: https://www.dropbox.com/developers/chooser – bfavaretto May 08 '13 at 02:54

2 Answers2

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I have been working on a Project that basically gives you versioned localStorage with support for conflict resolution if the same resource ends up being edited by two different clients. At this point there are no drivers for server or client (they are async in-memory at the moment for testing purposes) but there is a lot of code and abstraction to make writing your own drivers really easy... I was even thinking of doing a dropbox/google docs driver myself, except I want DynamoDB/MongoDB and Lawnchair done first.

The code is not dependent on jQuery or any other libraries and there's a pretty full features (though ugly) demo for it as are well.

Anyway the URL is https://github.com/forbesmyester/SyncIt

Forbesmyester
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Apparently, I have exactly the same issue and invetigated it thoroghly. The best choice would be remoteStorage, if you could manage to make it work. It allows to use 3rd party server for data storage or run your own instance.

Klaster_1 Нет войне
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