What cloud sync does

The BoothIQ cloud sync is the bidirectional pipeline between your kiosk and your cloud account. This article explains, in plain English, what flows in each direction and why.

Who this is for: Operators who want to understand the value (and the limits) of cloud sync.

The two directions

Booth → Cloud (push)

Things the booth pushes up to the cloud:

  • Transactions. So your sales appear in the cloud dashboard for monitoring and reporting
  • Credit transactions. So you have an audit trail of every credit movement, viewable from anywhere
  • Heartbeats. So the cloud knows the booth is alive. These include current credit balance, mode, and status
  • Hardware status updates. So the cloud knows when a piece of hardware goes offline
  • Logs (on demand). When support pushes a log download command
  • Operational metrics. Print supply, uptime, error counts

Cloud → Booth (pull)

Things the booth pulls down from the cloud:

  • Templates. So you can manage your template library centrally and push to all booths
  • Categories. Same: central category management
  • Layouts. Same
  • Business settings. When "Sync from cloud" is enabled in Settings, your business name / logo / location come from the cloud
  • Remote commands. See Remote commands
  • License updates. License renewals and revocations
  • Master password requests. Cloud-issued emergency passwords

How sync happens

There are two transports:

  1. WebSocket. For real-time push: a persistent connection over HTTPS so the cloud can deliver commands to the booth instantly without polling.
  2. HTTP polling. Fallback: when the WebSocket isn't available, the booth polls the cloud every 30-60 seconds to check for commands.

You don't pick which one to use. BoothIQ chooses automatically based on what's working. Both result in the same outcome.

What sync does NOT do

It's important to know what cloud sync doesn't do:

  • It does not back up your photos to the cloud by default. Customer photos stay on the kiosk unless you explicitly enable photo backup in your cloud configuration.
  • It does not stream live video from the kiosk camera to the cloud. There's no remote view of "what the booth's camera sees right now."
  • It does not let cloud users take over the touchscreen from outside. The customer-facing UI is always controlled by whoever is physically at the booth.
  • It does not require a constant connection. The booth queues events when offline and catches up when it reconnects.
  • It does not slow down the customer experience. Sync happens in the background.

What "offline-first" really means

BoothIQ is offline-first. The customer experience works completely without internet. Concretely:

With cloud sync:

  • Customer sessions work
  • Sales recorded locally
  • Sales visible in kiosk admin
  • Sales visible in cloud dashboard
  • Cloud admins can monitor remotely
  • Templates auto-update
  • License auto-renews

Without cloud sync:

  • Customer sessions work
  • Sales recorded locally
  • Sales visible in kiosk admin
  • Not visible in cloud (until reconnect)
  • Cloud admins cannot monitor
  • Templates frozen at last sync
  • License works until grace period ends

If the internet goes down at your venue mid-event, the booth keeps running. Sales accumulate in the local database. When the internet comes back, the booth catches up by pushing all the queued events to the cloud, usually within a minute.

The Sync Status card

In the Cloud Sync tab in admin, the right-column Sync Status card shows:

  • Pending items. How many events are queued waiting to sync (should be near zero on a healthy connection)
  • Last sync. Timestamp of the most recent successful sync
  • Total synced. Running lifetime count

A healthy booth sees pending items hover near zero with frequent Last Sync updates. A booth with a broken sync sees pending items growing with no recent sync.

Privacy considerations

Cloud sync sends transaction data, hardware status, and (optionally) photos to the BoothIQ cloud. Things to know:

  • Customer photos are NOT synced by default. They stay on the kiosk.
  • Customer email addresses (if collected) ARE synced as part of transaction data.
  • Hardware fingerprints are truncated for privacy. The cloud doesn't get full hardware IDs.
  • Sales data IS synced. That's the point.

For more on data and privacy, see Security › Data and privacy (coming soon).

Why some things don't sync immediately

Some events sync immediately (heartbeats, transactions). Some are batched (logs). The booth does this to:

  • Avoid hammering the cloud with thousands of small requests
  • Conserve bandwidth on metered connections
  • Survive brief network outages without losing data

If you take a customer session and don't see it in the cloud dashboard within a few seconds, give it a minute and try again. If it still isn't there after a few minutes, see Cloud sync not working (coming soon).

When to use cloud sync

Connect to the cloud when:

  • You have multiple booths and want centralized monitoring
  • You want sales reports accessible from anywhere
  • You want to push templates to all your booths from one place
  • You want remote command capability (add credits, restart, download logs)
  • You want license auto-renewal

Don't connect to the cloud when:

  • You have a single booth at a venue with no reliable internet (it'll work fine offline)
  • Your venue's IT policy prohibits outbound connections to third-party APIs
  • You're testing the booth in a development environment

Most operators connect to the cloud. The benefits are significant and the privacy/security model is reasonable.

Next steps