When saving a newly created or edited item, we get an “Added item” or “Edited item” green message, but nothing confirming that the server has been updated with the change.
What’s worse, if we go check the sync status under options>sync, the timestamp will be invariably from before the edit, leaving users believing that they need to sync manually or lose data. That’s terrible for Bitwarden reputation.
And yes, I know that the documentation online says “Adding, editing, or deleting vault items from any Bitwarden app will automatically push changes to your Bitwarden server, whether Cloud-hosted or self-hosted. In order to pull those changes down to another Bitwarden app, your vault will need to Sync.”
But this distinction between “push to server” and “sync” is:
buried in the documentation and undiscoverable for the average user
not referenced anywhere in the UI itself
overly technical and difficult to understand for the layman person
I would suggest to just do a full sync when saving and eliminate the one-way upload in order to be closer to user expectations.
Alternatively, please give better feedback to users:
Update the green notifications to say the change has been uploaded
Update the option>sync page with the timestamp of the last update to server
Hi @lorem - I am trying to understand what feature you are requesting here.
If you make a change to your vault contents on any client, this triggers an upload of the new vault contents to the server where the “master” copy of the vault is maintained. From this perspective, the Added Item or Edited Item message is entirely correct (my understanding is that these messages are presented after successful upload).
Are you asking that the server also initiates a push operation to force the updated vault down to all your Bitwarden client apps/extensions as well before this message is displayed?
While they are technically correct, they are ambiguous: they don’t clarify to the user whether “Added” refers to local storage or server.
And as I mentioned, going to options>sync furthers the confusion because the user reads that the vault was not “synced” with the server after the last item edit/save.
The distinction between “upload” and “sync” is not intuitive and the tab mentions last sync time (which typically happened before the item edit) but neglects to log the last upload time (which, hopefully, happened after the last item edit, but nothing in the UI at present confirms this).
I understood that pushing a change from the client to the server was different from a full sync, which I believe is correct.
So are you asking that a full sync be performed? If so, is it on just the one client or are you suggesting to all clients? I am not trying to argue. I am just trying to understand what you are proposing. You won’t get much support for this request if your ask isn’t clear.
I apologize - I was trying to clarify something at the root of your request because I don’t think what you are asking for is possible. But I can’t seem to communicate my question to you effectively, and for that I am sorry.
No need to apologise, I was assuming that feature parity between clients as a goal was desirable enough that it wouldn’t need to be made explicit in a feature request. My bad. In hindsight, better to be explicit, as you suggested.