Working offline

If your internet connection drops while you’re writing, you can keep going. Cleve holds your edits in the open tab and syncs them as soon as you’re back online, merging them with anything other people changed in the meantime.

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What works offline

• Editing docs you already have open. Keep typing, formatting, and restructuring as usual.
• Reading docs you already have open, including other open doc tabs.
• Exporting as PDF or Markdown, or copying as Markdown.
• Recording a meeting. The recording keeps capturing audio while you’re offline and is transcribed when you’re back. See Voice and meetings.

Everything else waits for a connection. See What needs a connection.

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Know when you’re offline

When Cleve loses its connection, a few things change:

• The Saved indicator in the doc toolbar is replaced by Offline. Hover over it to see “Keep writing. Your edits will sync when you’re back online, so keep this tab open until then.”
• A Reconnecting… notice appears until the connection is back.

Both disappear on their own once Cleve reconnects.

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When you reconnect

As soon as the connection returns, Cleve sends your edits and the toolbar goes back to Saved. You don’t need to do anything.

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If someone else edited the same doc

If a collaborator, or Cleve, changed the doc while you were offline, both sets of changes are merged and kept. Where you both edited the same passage the result can read oddly, and an edit you made inside a paragraph someone else deleted can’t be applied. So nothing you wrote is lost, Cleve also saves the doc as you had it, before the merge, as a named version called Your offline edits · date and time (for example, “Your offline edits · Oct 25, 3:42 PM”). A notice says “This doc changed while you were offline”. Click View history in the notice to open the doc’s version history, where you can compare that version with the merged doc and restore it if you need to. See Version history for comparing and restoring versions.

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What needs a connection

These features need Cleve’s servers, so they’re unavailable or paused while you’re offline:

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Signed out or session lost

Sometimes the network is fine but your sign-in session has expired or can’t be confirmed, for example after a long time asleep. Saving would fail in that state, so Cleve makes your docs read-only until the session is restored, instead of letting you type edits that can’t save.

• The doc toolbar shows Reconnecting. Hover over it to see “Read-only until your session is restored”.
• Usually this clears by itself within a few seconds.
• If it doesn’t, a message says “Reconnecting is taking longer than expected”. Click Reload to reload the page. Your docs stay on screen until you do.

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Tips

• Before you go somewhere with an unreliable connection, open the docs you’ll need in tabs. Docs you haven’t opened can’t load offline.
• Stay in the same browser tab until your edits sync.
• If you see a notice about offline edits after reconnecting, check the doc reads the way you expect, and use View history if anything needs recovering.

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