Syncing, working offline and conflicts
A surveyor is normally offline, and Mapit GIS is built for that. A sync, whenever there is signal, sends what the phone collected and brings back what colleagues did. When two people change the same thing, nothing is silently lost.
Working offline is normal
Collecting needs no signal. The app keeps every change on the phone and sends it at the next sync, whether that is in an hour or at the end of the week. A phone that has not synced today is not a phone that is not working, which is why the team activity board always says when each person last synced and never implies it is live.
What a sync does
A sync sends this phone’s new and changed features, then brings back everybody else’s. It never overwrites work this phone has not sent yet. It also brings the project’s structure up to date: when an admin or manager releases new fields or layers, they appear in the forms at the next sync, and features already collected keep their values.
A sync is never refused because it is large, or because it disagrees with a colleague’s work: the crew cannot fix either from the field. The one exception is a project that has been closed, when the organisation has ended the collection; edits a phone had not sent stay on that phone and go if the project is reopened.
Before it syncs, the app checks this phone may still sync for your organisation: each person can use Mapit Cloud on two phones or tablets, plus one QGIS install on a computer, which never takes a phone’s place, and the app must be recent enough (see Keeping the app up to date). If not, the app says why, and your work stays on the phone.
When two people change the same feature
Mapit Cloud merges field by field: two people changing different fields of one feature both keep their work. Where they set the same field to different values, or one edits what another deleted, the first to reach Mapit Cloud stands and the other is kept as a conflict. Nothing is silently lost, and an admin or a manager chooses whose edit stands. The dates Mapit GIS records on each feature never conflict, and a phone never conflicts with itself.
Resolving conflicts explains how to read a conflict and what choosing does.
What this does not do
Sync is not a backup of the phone. Work that was never synced is only on that phone, and so are photos and videos, whose files never sync at all. If a phone is lost before it synced, its unsent work is lost with it.