MoneyWell 3 & the Cloud

We often get asked about using cloud sync services such as Dropbox with MoneyWell 3.

People ask us if they can use them as a workaround to the missing sync option with MoneyWell 3.

We do not advise this.

These sync services generally work by monitoring one or more folders / directories on your computer, and when they notice any changes, they upload the changed file(s) to the cloud service. Other devices that you are syncing with will be notified of those changes and replacing their (now out of date copies) with the freshly uploaded one from the server.

This sounds like it should be ideal for MoneyWell 3. Unfortunately, the reality is that because these services operate on the file level (noticing any changes to a file), while MoneyWell 3 uses a database (which is stored inside the MoneyWell 3 file package) there is a very real possibility that it can corrupt your data by uploading a version of MoneyWell's database which contains half written changes. Sadly, we've seen this on more than one occasion. Sometimes it's possible to recover data when this happens, and sometimes people end up with an empty file.

We understand that these services are very useful (and we use them too) but unfortunately for now at least, they shouldn't be used as a way to sync MoneyWell 3.