Your session on two computers

Profile settings travel through your account: name, scenario, fingerprint template, proxy, group, tags. Cookies, logins and site storage do not, because they sit in the profile directory on the machine that made them.

So an honest move to a second computer means signing in to thirty accounts again. The shortcuts are worse: a hand-copied profile folder gives a broken database, and one account open in two browsers at once is the pattern that gets it reviewed.

ARMANOS answers that in two halves. A session travels as one encrypted file through a folder you already own, and a profile opens on one machine at a time.

You point ARMANOS at a folder on the Engine screen, in the Sessions on two computers, through a folder block, and anything your own cloud already syncs will do. A cloud drive, a work network share, a folder on a NAS: the app does not know which one it is and does not ask.

That is a deliberate choice. We run no storage for your sessions, so there is nothing of yours for us to hold, lose or hand over.

1. 1

   Choose the folder

   Any folder your cloud syncs. The app writes a probe file first, because a share can look available and refuse the first real write.

2. 2

   Set a passphrase

   The Passphrase for the sync files field: at least 8 characters, and the same on both machines.

3. 3

   Name this computer

   That name is what the other machine shows you when a session arrives from here.

4. 4

   Turn on Sync sessions

   Without a folder and a passphrase the switch refuses, instead of saying on and doing nothing.

Two files per profile appear in your folder: the encrypted archive and a small plain label the other machine reads first. That archive holds the sessions of both engines in one file.

Alongside them goes the profile itself, with its id. The id travels because the fingerprint is derived from it. The browser version of a profile without a pinned kernel comes from the computer, so keep the app updated on both and use the same engine on both.

The cache stays home deliberately. Caches, shader caches, worker storage and crash dumps are hundreds of megabytes that sites refill by themselves. The components the engine downloads for itself, such as speech voices, stay home too: it downloads them again on the other machine.

The file here is the one the manual profile transfer already uses, so you open by one route what you wrote by the other. A header, a random 16 byte salt, a 12 byte nonce, scrypt with N 32768 to a 256 bit key, then AES-256-GCM.

A wrong passphrase gives you an honest refusal rather than garbage, because the file carries an integrity tag. The passphrase is kept on this machine and the app says so on screen: asking for it at every close would mean no automatic upload at all.

On Windows the system seals your passphrase with a key tied to your Windows account. On macOS it is sealed with a key that ships inside the program, and on Linux it goes as typed into a file readable only by you, so on both it does not protect against anyone who can read your user folder. It never enters the sync folder and never comes back to the screen.

Before a profile opens, the app takes a newer session from the folder. It has to be before the window exists: replacing files under a running browser leaves a broken profile.

Four seconds after a profile closes, the session is sent: a browser keeps writing its databases for a second or two after the window disappears, and the app checks again that the profile is still closed. If you quit ARMANOS or install an update while profiles are open, the app asks first. Save and close waits up to a minute for the sessions to reach the folder, and Close without waiting closes at once and sends them at the next start.

While the app is open it watches the folder once a minute, reading one timestamp rather than every label. It never pulls silently, because someone else's session arriving in a profile you are working in would swap the ground under you.

• Send mine to the folder

  Per profile, with a confirmation that says plainly it replaces what is there.

• Take the one from the folder

  Per profile, replacing the session this computer holds for it.

• Send all and Take all

  One after another: thirty simultaneous writes into a cloud folder invite duplicate copies.

The app decides by marks rather than by clocks. It asks whether this machine's session changed since the last sync and whether the folder's label did, so two clocks on two machines never enter it.

If both changed, two people worked in parallel and either write would throw away real logins. So nothing travels in either direction, and you get a notification naming the other computer, a mark on the row and two buttons in the profile card.

Send mine to the folder settles the argument for this machine. What you replace is copied aside first and the last three copies are kept, so a click made without thinking costs a minute rather than a day of work.

A cloud copies files one at a time, and the small label beats the big archive. So the app checks the size on disk against the size the label promises, and a pair that disagrees is left alone.

A missing archive is not an empty folder either. Space-saving modes take file contents off the disk and leave a stub, so the rule is simple: a label means a session exists.

The app lays a new archive beside the old one and renames it only then, because half an archive on top of a working session cannot be decrypted. Once an hour it sweeps leftovers older than an hour whose name is exactly its own, and never touches anybody else's file.

An open profile is left alone in both directions, because a copy taken mid-write is a broken profile on the other computer. The batch buttons skip open profiles too and tell you how many.

When you are signed in, an open profile also holds a lock on the server. A second machine is refused by name, and you can take the profile over on purpose.

Each of your computers gets a random identifier of its own, so two laptops with the same name are two machines. Your seats are a workspace pool that follows the live subscription, and unlinking a machine frees its seat at once.