Syncing Taskwarrior with GCS to start a new replica does not work

[djmitche]

Discussed in #4122

^{Originally posted by manoelpqueiroz June 6, 2026}
Hi guys, I'm trying to understand why I am unable to use task sync to initiate tracking on a new replica of my tasks. Taskwarrior returns a code 0 with a success message, but nothing is imported. 🤷🏻‍♂️

My task show verbose output is as follows:

affected,blank,context,edit,header,footnote,label,new-id,news,project,special,sync,override,recur

Given that, despite verbosity for sync being set, nothing really meaningful has been shown, I'll go through what exactly happened and I would greatly appreciate if anyone could provide some light on what might be causing this misbehaviour. 🙏🏻

Context

I have a Google Cloud Storage bucket set up to synchronise my tasks. It was working flawlessly across two separate machines, so both machines had correctly set up their gcloud authentication.

At some point, I wanted to change the encryption secret to a different passphrase, and here's what I did on the main machine I use with Taskwarrior:

1. I have deleted all the files present in the GCS bucket;
2. Changed the sync.encryption_secret configuration to the desired passphrase;
3. Ran task sync.

If I check the files in my bucket, I can confirm that the following are present:

• salt, created when I ran task sync;
• latest (currently sitting at 32 B), with its "Last Modified" pointing to the last sync command I ran on the main machine;
• Several v-hash files of varying sizes, each one matching a task sync command run where changes had been enacted.

The Issue

On the additional machine, the following has been done:

1. Changed the sync.encryption_secret configuration to match the new passphrase;
2. Removed the .task directory to clean the entire task list.

I have tried to run both task sync and task sync init, and both commands output the message:

Syncing with GCP bucket mpq-tasks
Success!

However, despite this, not a single task is imported after the operation, and the task list is empty.

I am unfortunately clueless as to why there is a sucess message, but no replication of the tasks.

Main Suspicion

My suspicion, despite being unable to confirm it myself, is that the sync operations run from the main machine in the Context section do not actually send all the tasks to the GCS bucket. From my understanding, the v-hash files refer only to diffs between one sync and another.

For instance, I do remember that after running step 3 to sync the tasks after resetting the bucket, only the salt file had been created with a 16-byte size. Given that I have more than 1,000 tasks in my list, I can at least infer this salt file does not store any task data.

I hope this information is sufficient for you guys to help me with this issue, I have tried to be as thorough in my description as possible. 🙇🏻‍♂️ If you need any additional information to be able to understand the situation, please let me know and I appreciate beforehand any help! 😉

[djmitche]

Your intuition is good. You did not mention seeing any snapshot files in the bucket, and indeed those would contain all of the tasks, while versions contain only deltas. So the bug is that the second machine is signalling success when it has not actually done anything.

I can reproduce this with a local task server, so it is not specific to GCP.

[djmitche]

(GothenburgBitFactory/taskchampion#740 filed to solve this in TaskChampion)

[JaimeGarciaReinoso]

Hi guys, I'm encountering a similar issue while trying to sync the Taskchamp iOS app with my Mac. Due to some stability problems with the iCloud storage sync method, I decided to switch to GCS syncing.

Similar to OP, my bucket only contains the latest, salt, and v-hash files. After performing a sync, the Taskchamp app remains completely empty and shows no data.

I suspect this is related to #4133. Does anyone know of a temporary workaround while a permanent fix is being worked on?

Thanks and best regards,
Jaime

[JaimeGarciaReinoso]

Hi guys, I'm encountering a similar issue while trying to sync the Taskchamp iOS app with my Mac. Due to some stability problems with the iCloud storage sync method, I decided to switch to GCS syncing.

Similar to OP, my bucket only contains the latest, salt, and v-hash files. After performing a sync, the Taskchamp app remains completely empty and shows no data.

I suspect this is related to #4133. Does anyone know of a temporary workaround while a permanent fix is being worked on?

Thanks and best regards, Jaime

Well, I came up with a temporary workaround, just in case it works for others:

• First of all, remove all files from your bucket on the GCS. Then, in your terminal:

task export all-tasks.json
mv .task .task.backup #just in case
task sync init
task import all-tasks.json
task sync

Best,
Jaime

[djmitche]

That is probably the baseline, most-reliable approach.