I should be able to have my two devices online (same WIFI needed maybe) and make both identical, just like it happens when I add a second device.
Actual behavior
I installed Delta Chat on my phone and started using it. Then I logged in on my laptop as Second Device, all messages where copied I think. After a while, I’ve seen that some messages are not in my laptop app, because I don’t open it much. I’d like to have a kind of “mirror devices” option, so that I have a backup of my phone app conversations. Maybe this feature could be handled with the “resend” option (now I can only resend manually my own messages only, not other people’s)
I agree that this feature proposal in general has its merit and many other users have already requested this.
For the sake of completeness, I’d still like to add a few remarks about the specific scenario that you intend to use it for.
Such a mirror device is not a substitute for an archive or “a backup of your phone app conversations”, because it will continue to lose disappearing messages (including ones which you had sent yourself) and messages removed manually later.
If you regularly keep such a device you intend to use as a mirror off for weeks, your expected window of data loss will be unacceptably high. Some people already consider daily backups unacceptably sparse!
A known workaround is that if you know that more time had elapsed since last powering on the desktop than the cleanup deadline on your chatmail server (7 days by default for big attachments), you should remove the profile on the desktop and add it as a secondary device again from scratch.
If you create an email account (classic) for exclusive use with DeltaChat, there should be no difficulties.
Just create a new profile and enter classic email user + password. DeltaChat is after all, an email client.
With a classic account you can keep the messages in the server for as long as you want, provided there is enough space.
Although, if you are a heavy user, you might have some problems sending due to providers limitations in the number of recipients in some time interval (it happened to me only once, a long time ago).
With multiple transports, sending problems will probably be less frequent.
Actually it means you get to decide when messages are deleted from the server, so you can make sure they stay there long enough so that your other devices get to download them.
DC has a global option to delete messages from server after a certain period of time if the account is classic, so you can control it. Also you can set it to never delete from server and rely in timers set to individual chats.
Your backup still is your other device in this scenario, and it never misses messages because or server deletion.
Chat mail servers manage the deletion timeout themselves, but as mentioned have other advantages over classic mail servers.
Finally I decided to re-login my desktop app from a backup file. I got a strange message but it worked, I think all my complete conversations (except from one maybe, as I mentioned here) are on my desktop app. So there is a way, not very hard, to do this. Great!
I don’t have time for trying again now, but I might in the future 