Offline sync (local-first)
Working without internet, with changes uploading to the cloud on their own once the connection returns.
Can I have a system that works offline and syncs across several computers?
In a local-first architecture, each computer works from its own copy of the data, and the cloud exists so the computers can agree with each other and so there's a backup. If the connection drops, changes wait in a queue and upload once it's back.
The hard part is conflicts, when two people change the same piece of data while offline. Some rules are simple, like keeping the most recent change; others are finer-grained, field by field, depending on how many people are editing at once.
Why it matters to your business
The internet goes down sometimes, and a business that grinds to a halt every time the connection fails loses time and sales. With offline sync, the front desk keeps working and nobody loses what they typed.
How we use this at Damorus
We designed this in from day one at Atlantic Center: an immutable base with a layer of changes on top in IndexedDB, and every record as a document in Supabase, watched in real time by every computer. Without a connection, changes just queue up; if two computers touch the same document, the most recent one wins, a rule that's good enough for two office staff. On download, whatever a computer already has that the cloud doesn't yet is always kept, and during testing that rule saved information more than once.
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