Moving work between machines

A profile is settings plus a session, and the two travel by different roads. Settings reach your other computers through your account, and a session does not.

Cookies, logins and site storage sit in the profile folder on the machine whose browser wrote them. They stay there until you move them on purpose.

• Through your account

  The name, the scenario, the group, tags, notes, the fingerprint template and the proxy.

• Only with the session

  Cookies, logins, site storage, the two-factor key and any fingerprint values you picked by hand.

• Not at all

  The browser engine, the extension files and the caches, because every computer holds its own.

Nothing about a fingerprint is kept on disk. It is computed again at every launch from the profile's own number and the template the profile was made with.

So the same number on another computer gives the same graphics card, the same screen and the same font list. The number sits inside the transfer, and that is the whole reason a move works at all.

Where a profile arrived without its session, the device still answers exactly as it did. What is missing is the account's own memory of this browser.

With no cookies and no stored token there is nothing left for the platform to recognise, so the visit reads as a fresh sign-in and brings the checks a fresh sign-in brings.

A profile created from scratch on the second computer gets a new number, and a new number means a different graphics card and a different screen.

Familiar logins poured into it mean the account sees its own session answering from a machine it has never met. That pairing is worse than either half of it alone.

A session travels as one encrypted file, and there are two ways to carry it. By hand, or through a folder your own cloud already syncs.

Both roads write the same file, so a session written one way opens the other. Caches are left out of it, because sites refill those by themselves.

Each installation of the app holds an identifier of its own, kept on that machine and never packed into a transfer. That is what keeps two computers counted as two.

The engine stays behind for a plainer reason. Every computer installs its own, and the version it holds is the browser version your profiles report.

Starting a profile claims it for the machine that opened it. A second machine is refused, told who holds it and since when, and taking it over is a decision rather than an accident.

The claim lasts three minutes and is renewed while the window is open, so a machine that loses power lets the profile go by itself.

If the session changed here and in the folder since the last exchange, two people worked in parallel and either write would throw away real logins. Nothing is written in either direction.

You are told which computer the other session came from, and you choose. What you replace is set aside as a copy first.

The profile moves and the machine does not. Everything else in this lesson follows from that one line.

Close the profile, let the session travel, then open it on the other side.