If an employee is using Hubstaff and their computer crashes will their tracked time be lost?
An abrupt shutdown (i.e. power outage, force shutting down the app via task manager or the app quitting unexpectedly while tracking) may cause a halt to a computer, causing the desktop app to crash or not quit properly. Consequently, when you restart the app, we detect you as idle as no activity was being tracked, and resume tracking because the timer was never stopped manually upon restart. Since the transient information collected about your activity levels was lost due to a possible abrupt shutdown, which results in the desktop app quitting abnormally and the time that it took to restart during which it would be impossible for us to track activity, there is no option but to report the time as ‘0’ activity (idle in this case).
It’s all a matter of how we present the information. Idle time should be reported as idle time, not ‘0’ activity, as they are not equivalent. Idle time is a specific definition (subset) of activity in which we have determined based on the configuration that the employer wishes to treat X consecutive seconds of ‘0’ activity as Idle. In this case, we did not make that determination, we simply reported what we knew to definitively occur.
You should have the option to preserve ‘lost’ time that can occur due to an unclean shutdown, or discard it. However, you will only see the alert/dialogue if less than 1 hour has passed since you started the timer back up when using the desktop app (Mac/Windows/Linux/Chromebook) or less than 8 hours if you are using the mobile app (Android/iOS). If the time it takes to start the app again exceeds the time limits stated previously, the time will get discarded automatically.
On the activities screen, time kept from an abrupt shutdown will show as Resumed Time as shown below:
