Working offline
What keeps working with no connection, what does not, and how offline edits merge when you come back.
Collaboration & sync 2 min read
The solver runs on your machine, not on a server, so losing the connection does not stop you working. It stops you syncing, which is a much smaller problem.
What works offline
| Capability | Offline |
|---|---|
| Opening a project you already have loaded | Yes |
| Modeling — geometry, sections, supports, loads | Yes |
| Meshing | Yes |
| Solving | Yes — it runs on your CPU |
| Reading results, diagrams, tables | Yes |
| Design checks | Yes |
| Generating a report | Yes |
| Importing a SAF or DXF file you already have on disk | Yes |
| Exporting SAF, OOFEM or a spreadsheet | Yes |
| Opening a project you have never opened on this machine | No |
| Signing in for the first time on this device | No |
| Seeing collaborators' changes | No — they arrive on reconnect |
| Inviting people, changing billing | No |
The pattern: anything about your model and your machine keeps working; anything about other people or our servers waits.
Preparing for a known outage
Open the project before you lose connectivity — on the train, on site, on the flight. Once it is open on that device it stays available, and everything you do is recorded locally.
Reconnecting
Edits made offline queue locally and merge automatically when the connection returns. Merging is deterministic and produces no conflict files: operations from different people on different parts of the model all apply, and where two people changed the same property, the later write wins — resolved identically on every device, whatever order the updates arrive in.
After a long offline session on a shared model, look over the parts you did not touch before continuing. There is no comparison view yet, so this is a read rather than a diff — one more reason to agree the boundary first.
Where care is needed
Merging guarantees no lost work, not a sensible model. If you will be offline and someone else is in the project, agree the boundary first — see Sharing a project.
Browser storage
Offline capability depends on the browser keeping local data.
If something does not merge
Unsynced changes are visible in the project's sync state. If a project appears stuck with pending changes after the connection has returned, export what you have and mail [email protected] before clearing anything. Sync problems are recoverable while the local data still exists, and not afterwards.
Something wrong or unclear on this page? Tell us, and it gets corrected.