Offline mode in Asana: what you can and cannot do

Asana Community Community Tips Forum Leader tips
23

Adding a note that this feature would be super helpful. I’ve had multiple people at my org ask for this functionality.

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24

Hi is this already working? Now with the server outtage due to AWS DB something something my iOS app and iphone app lost all tasks..

This while I had my important meeting and I could not access the points to discuss..

The offline mode should have saved me, instead the app tried to reload and then lost all tasks and I am here with nothing except the notes I have from the previous meeting which I did not make in Asana.

Just viewing the project tasks would already have saved me, creating tasks would have been great. But this did not work.
Do I have to turn on Offline mode manually?

It would be great if this was the default and then the app would check if it is able to synchronize. If it can it should, but now it left me hanging.

4 Likes
Is it possible to synch/backup the tasks of some crucial projects to external list either online or offline?
25

I am now synching with google sheets as backup (https://help.asana.com/s/article/google-sheets-asana) but I hope the asana offline feature will be updated to handle server black outs!

3 Likes
26

This is one of those unfortunate situations where a reasonable default technical constant makes the broader premise unusable. Asana is there because I forget things, and moments when I’m stuck offline are actually perfect for organizing my TODOs. If I need to open them all on my phone beforehand, though, then I’ll never be able to.

I do think that part of the problem here is scale. I’m a personal Asana user, my set of projects and tasks isn’t huge, but I can imagine how difficult this would be for a large business. That said, Asana is oriented around creating multiple projects over time, and I think that means projects could be a reasonable boundary for syncing.

If the constraints were:

  • You need to explicitly check a project in order for it to be synced
  • Attached files aren’t automatically available offline
  • Toggle whether offline import can only happen over wifi vs cellular

then that seems like it’d keep the data consumption in check while solving 90% of usecases. Those aren’t trivial features to build, but they’d be a huge quality of life improvement.

Without having that available, I’m going to explore ways of hacking it together. Not sure what sort of tooling is available for accepting the Asana app on Android, but my rough idea would be:

  1. Use the API to pull a list of all task URLs
  2. Use some Android automation to open those URLs, ideally in the background
  3. Automatically trigger the above on a scheduled cadence, maybe once or twice per day

TBD on when I’ll get a chance to try prototyping this, but if anyone else comes across this post and has ideas, please share!!