Question What will happen to my Chromebook sync if I log into an older Chromebook?

[Minaz]

I have 2 newer Chromebooks that I use and which sync to each other. That means if I install something on one Chromebook, it will be installed on the other. If I change the wallpaper on one, the wallpaper gets changed on the other. I actually did not know that Chromebooks had this feature when I got the second Chromebook, but it is quite convenient (most of the time, although once in a while I do wish it didn't sync EVERYTHING). The way it happened was that when I got the first Chromebook, I set up everything from stock, and when I got my second Chromebook, after I finished signing in, Google immediately started to sync everything to the first one.

Several years ago, I had a third Chromebook that I haven't used in a while (I am calling this the third Chromebook because I mentioned it third, but it is chronologically the first one that I bought). I am curious what will happen if I booted up the third Chromebook and logged into my Google account. For whatever reason, the first Chromebook did not pull the settings and sync to this older Chromebook - perhaps Google had not yet implemented Chromebook sync back in the day? But obviously, Google now has, so what will happen if I did boot up this old Chromebook? Will it try to sync my newer settings to this older Chromebook or vice versa? Or will it continue to ignore the fact that I am signed in to the same account and not sync since I had not set it up previously? Will I be given the choice?

Obviously, one way to know for sure would be to boot into the older Chromebook, but I am kind of worried what might happen to the 2 newer ones because I just got everything setup the way I want and would prefer not to take the chance that everything is going to be messed up by a Google franken-merge.
Does anyone know what would happen to the sync if I signed into the older Chromebook?

 

[QwerkyPengwen]

I do not know personally and have not bothered doing any Googling for this, but my guess would be that it works how most any other cloud sync based system works wherein it tries to update the old with the new, so if you have an older outdated system with timestamps on everything that is older than your current data stored in the cloud, the system would rather try to update the old outdated system using the newer data rather than overwriting newer data with older data.

The only thing I can think of happening in regards to older data would be if it's data that doesn't exist new or old in the sync and it tries to simply add that data to the backup.

My best advice is to simply Google your question "if I sign into an old chromebook will it overwrite my new chromebook data when I sync" or something like that and see what might already exist for Q&A.

Or, you could always do a factory reset on the device then just sign into your account and have it sync to update using the new data that way with no chance for old data to overwrite new data because it doesn't exist on the device anymore.

 

[Minaz]

I do not know personally and have not bothered doing any Googling for this, but my guess would be that it works how most any other cloud sync based system works wherein it tries to update the old with the new, so if you have an older outdated system with timestamps on everything that is older than your current data stored in the cloud, the system would rather try to update the old outdated system using the newer data rather than overwriting newer data with older data.

The only thing I can think of happening in regards to older data would be if it's data that doesn't exist new or old in the sync and it tries to simply add that data to the backup.

My best advice is to simply Google your question "if I sign into an old chromebook will it overwrite my new chromebook data when I sync" or something like that and see what might already exist for Q&A.

Or, you could always do a factory reset on the device then just sign into your account and have it sync to update using the new data that way with no chance for old data to overwrite new data because it doesn't exist on the device anymore.

The irony in this reply is very great.