Sage Kobo's syncing makes me sad

[Cactus Chef]

I have a Sage and a Clara HD. I mostly use the Sage when I'm at home, and the Clara goes into my travel kit. I let them both connect to WiFi so that they passively sync, because I don't like having to boot up the Clara during my morning rush just to make sure my books are up to date.

More often then I'd care to count, the Clara fails to sync during the night. I'll open it in the morning, start to read a book, realize it's chapters behind, then manually sync it. But in doing so, Kobo's cloud service apparently decides, "Oh, you just this book twenty seconds ago. This must be the new authoritative spot in your book," and promptly pushes the sync out THE OTHER WAY, overwriting a week of progress on my Sage. It just did it this morning where I opened a book on the Clara that I had since finished on the Sage and started its sequel, but the Clara's sync decided to resurrect that book back from the "finished" status back to whatever the Clara has last recorded.

[issybird]

I've run into this, too. Also on Kindle, I must note, although my main issue with Kindle is when the current device hangs and doesn't sync to anything, which happens a lot.

So. The quick and dirty solution in both cases (which I don't always remember to do) is to hit a bookmark before you close it. It's a failsafe when sync fails.

[Sirtel]

These issues are why I gave up syncing more than a decade ago (with Kindles, then). It was just faster and less annoying to find my place purely by memory. And I don't have a particularly good memory by any yardstick.

It's indeed sad to read that nothing has improved in more than 10 years and sync problems are still going on. Makes me less than hopeful that if Kobo eventually implemented syncing for sideloaded books, it would then work correctly.

[Cactus Chef]

What bugs me is that this should be an easily solved problem. It suggests that the Kobo software is not simply looking to see if the current page index is not behind the 'synced' index, or this would never happen. I suspect there's probably a timestamp it's checking against instead, e.g. book was last opened at 2025/10/04 11:00 AM on this device and last datetime is 2025/10/04 12:02 AM on the cloud side, ergo current book's progress should become new milestone.

But how hard would it be to just validate first that I actually read a page in my book after opening it before updating the timestamp? Opening the book, realizing it's chapters behind, and then closing it so that I can try to sync should not count towards resetting the timestamp...

[Quoth]

It's not simple and I've had the Kindle sync mess up too.

I use rsync (via grsync) to have stuff between a workstation, server and two laptops and it is not simple.