A second computer and the same accounts: what travels along

Your cookies, saved logins and site storage are written by the browser into the profile folder on the computer you worked at. The second computer cannot see that folder, and the only way it fills one is from scratch.

Only the settings reach the second machine through your account: name, group, scenario, fingerprint template, proxy and tags. The same profile opens there but empty inside, so the platform meets a stranger rather than you.

1. 1

   Settings travel alone

   The profile record lives in your account and reaches every machine you sign in on.

2. 2

   The session waits

   Cookies and logins stay on the first machine until you send them yourself.

3. 3

   The fingerprint holds

   The profile id travels with the record, so the fingerprint stays the same.

Your account carries the profile record: name, group, scenario, fingerprint template, proxy, tags and notes. That is enough for the profile list on the second machine to look exactly like the list on the first.

Everything else lives on the disk of the machine whose browser wrote it, and it travels nowhere on its own. The table below splits one and the same profile window in two.

Your cookies, your login pair and your one-time code key never reach the server: the profile record has no room for them at all. A request that carries such a field anyway is refused whole rather than trimmed.

For you that means two things at once. There is nowhere to hand your live sessions out from, and you are the only one who can move them to a second machine.

There are exactly two, and the choice is yours. The first is a file, Transfer with session in the profile menu: a closed profile goes into one password-protected archive that you carry on a stick, by mail or however you like.

The second is Session in the folder. On the Engine screen, in Sessions on two computers, through a folder, you point the app at any directory your own cloud already syncs, and the session of a closed profile goes there by itself.

The archive carries everything that keeps an account logged in, plus the profile id the fingerprint is derived from. That is why on the second machine it is the same machine and not one that merely resembles it.

A password of 8 characters or more closes the file, with scrypt and AES-256-GCM, and a wrong password gets an honest refusal. The size limit is 400 MB, and you rarely come near it because the cache stays out.

1. 1

   The session travels

   Cookies, logins and site storage of both engines sit in one archive.

2. 2

   The id travels

   The profile id and the generator generation travel together, so the fingerprint matches.

3. 3

   The cache and components stay

   19 cache directories and 5 service files stay home: sites refill them themselves. So do the components the engine downloads for itself, such as speech voices: it downloads them again on the other machine.

A copy and an archive look alike and carry different things. A copy is a blank for a new account: its own fingerprint, its own code key and its own login, or two accounts would look like one machine.

Ten fields are common to every transfer road, and the archive adds five more on top of them. Those five are the whole difference between the same account on a second machine and a new account standing beside it.

A profile open right now goes nowhere under any circumstances. A running browser is writing its databases, and a copy taken mid-flight would arrive on the second machine broken.

When both sides changed since the last exchange, neither of them is touched. It means two machines were worked in parallel, and which session to keep is your call rather than the app's.

1. 1

   Closed profiles travel

   The session goes out after you close the profile, not while you are working.

2. 2

   It arrives before the start

   A fresh session comes in from the folder before the profile opens for you.

3. 3

   The choice stays yours

   When both sides changed. On upload the previous pair is then set aside as a copy, and the last three such copies are kept.

Before an exchange the program answers two questions: did the session change here, and did it change there. A pair of questions has four answers: send, fetch, do nothing, and conflict.

«Changed here» compares the session stamp with the same stamp remembered at the last exchange, and both stamps are taken on one machine. They are compared for inequality rather than for «later»: if the clock on the machine was turned back, «later» would stop noticing changes altogether.

«Changed there» does not compare file times of two machines, because their clocks differ. It compares the stamp in the folder with the stamp the program last took from there or put there.

When two machines write to the shared folder at the same time, the cloud does not ask but puts a second copy beside the first: «name 2», «name (2)», «conflicted copy», «копия», or a machine name in capitals after a hyphen. The program knows those four handwritings and looks for such files next to its own.

A copy found is a sign of a conflict, and the program names it to you. The profile's own file never lands on that list, or ordinary work would look like a conflict.

One password closes every session in the shared folder, and it is worth more than any single profile's password. On Windows the system seals it with a key tied to your Windows account. On macOS it is sealed with a key that ships inside the program, and on Linux it is written as typed, so on both it does not protect against anyone who can read your user folder.

A locked password that will not open keeps its locked form until you type a new one, so that one failed opening does not wipe the only copy.

Half-written pieces of an exchange left behind by a break are swept by the program itself after an hour. Before the hour they are left alone, because the write might still be in progress from the other machine.

The exchange runs between your own machines, and the number of seats for them sits in the plan. A machine takes a seat at its first sign-in and frees it again at the moment you unlink it.

Seats follow the payment in force, not a number handed out at some point in the past. After a downgrade the extra machine loses its seat and cannot win it back by signing in again.

Open the profile on the second machine and visit the platform that has remembered you the longest. Getting in with no password and no confirmation means the session arrived whole.

A confirmation prompt leaves two things to check: whether you closed the profile before sending it, and whether the passphrase for the sync files is the same on both.