Background syncing

On your phone, Haystack keeps your project up to date and uploads your photos while the app is in the background, so it is already current the next time you open it on set. It runs quietly and tunes itself, so you rarely need to think about it.

How often it runs

How often your phone syncs in the background scales with your project and your own activity, to protect your battery:

• While a project is busy, Haystack nudges your phone to sync up to a couple of times an hour.
• As a project goes quiet the nudges taper off, and a project with no changes for a couple of days stops triggering them.
• If you have not opened Haystack for about five days, your device drops out of the background schedule, then rejoins on its own the next time you open the app.

So you never have to turn background sync off when you are away from set. It winds down by itself and picks back up when you return.

Turning it on

Background sync uses two things together. Allow both so it can run reliably:

1. Notifications. Haystack sends a silent background nudge, with no banner or sound, that wakes the app to sync. Allow notifications when the app first asks, or turn them on later in your phone settings for Haystack.
2. Background App Refresh on iPhone, or background activity on Android. This lets the app run a short sync on its own roughly every 15 minutes. On iPhone, turn on Background App Refresh for Haystack in Settings. On Android, allow background activity and leave Haystack out of battery optimisation.

Background sync is a convenience, not a requirement. Haystack always syncs the moment you open the app, and you can keep working offline in between. See Working offline.