Shared histroty in dualboot setups

Support
#1

Hi everyone,
I have a dual boot setup with linux and windows. I use activity watch on both of them and I want to know if I can make the acrivity watch use same database/record files for accessiblity. My main purpose is to track the time overall and not seperately. Or alternatively, is there a way for me view the tracked time of other setup without booting into the other OS.

This seem possible to me if I can configure actiwity watch to put its db into a shared disk but I don’t know if activity watch supports something like this.

Best regards,

#2

I think you could use a shared partition where both systems could read and write.

#3

Hi, thank you for answering. How can I setup activitywatch to be used like this?

#4

I don’t think you currently can do that. We’ll work on that. I’m also currently dual booting.

#5

TBH I’m not sure, it’s just that recently I moved all my data to another PC and it copied all the ActivityWatch data, so my current installation has data from the old PC and the new one. That’s why it comes to my mind that maybe if two instances write to the same directory it may work as a solution to keep a shared history.

The main problem could be to make both installations point to the same data directory. Which I don’t know how to setup. But this could be address using links to the data directory on each OS so they point to the physical location.

For the shared partitions just use the same tools used for dual boot (GParted from a livecd) and create a partition in NTFS (readable by Windows and Linux)

=== Update==
DB on linux is on $HOME/.local/share/activitywatch/aw-server/peewee-sqlite.v2.db

This is the file that should live in a shared partition and have links to it on their respective OS

#6

Taken from the doc: Directories

Data directories for each OS is at follows:

Windows: C:\Users\<USER>\AppData\Local\activitywatch\activitywatch
macOS: ~/Library/Application\ Support/activitywatch
Linux: ~/.local/share/activitywatch

So, this is what i suggest to do:

  1. Create a new NTFS partition
  2. Move the peewee-sqlite.v2.db file into that partition
  3. Create links to point to your peewee-sqlite.v2.db from:
    *) C:\Users<USER>\AppData\Local\activitywatch\activitywatch/aw-server/peewee-sqlite.v2.db
    *) ~/.local/share/activitywatch/aw-server/peewee-sqlite.v2.db
  4. Run ActivityWatch normally

That trick would make the DB and it’s tracking data available for both systems. Each one will be stored by it’s hostname.