What Barn Mode is
Barns eat cell service. So do show halls and fairgrounds. Barn Mode is how the HARES app keeps working anyway: you can look through your herd, weigh a kit, record a litter, sell a rabbit and take photos with zero bars, and every bit of it sends itself the moment you're back in service. It works exactly the same at a show table as it does at home.
There is nothing to turn on. No switch, no button, no "offline mode" to remember. The app notices it can't reach HARES and carries on.
The one habit that makes it work
Open the app for a minute while you still have signal, before you head out to a dead spot.
That's it. While the app is open with service it quietly saves a copy of your herd, your litters, your photos and your pages onto the phone. That saved copy is what you're reading out in the barn. If a phone has never been online with HARES, there's nothing stored on it to show you.
What you can do with no signal
- Look through your herd and open any animal's page and pedigree
- Log a weight
- Edit an animal — name, ear number, colour, cage, notes, anything
- Add a brand-new rabbit or cavy
- Record a litter, and update it as it kindles and weans
- Record a sale ringside, and add the customer while you're at it
- Take reservations, and assign a kit to one
- Start a transfer to another breeder
- Take photos
- Pick animals for a show entry
What honestly needs signal
- Sending a show entry. Picking your animals works offline and your picks are safe — but the entry itself needs live show rules and fees, so the sending waits.
- Accepting a transfer someone sent you. Sending one is fine; accepting moves an animal between accounts and needs the server.
- Account and password changes, so you can't lock yourself out.
- Anything that emails or prints — pedigree emails, PDFs, share links.
- Live show results, which are other people's data as it happens.
When you tap one of these with no signal, the app says so in plain words. Nothing is broken and nothing was lost — it'll work normally the moment you're back in service.
How to tell what's going on
A yellow stripe across the top means you're reading a saved copy. It'll tell you how old the copy is — "from 20 min ago" — so you know how fresh what you're looking at is.
"2 changes waiting to send" means exactly that: your work is saved on the phone and queued. It's not lost and it's not sent yet.
When signal comes back, the app sends everything on its own and drops you back into the live HARES. You don't have to press anything. If you want to watch it happen, the Barn Mode screen shows the count going to zero.
"This page isn't saved on this phone"
If you tap something the app never got a chance to save — a page you haven't opened since installing — you'll get a screen saying so, with a way back and a button into Barn Mode.
That's not a bug and nothing is wrong with your account. It's the app being honest instead of showing you a blank or made-up page. Open that page once when you have signal and it'll be waiting for you next time.
If a change comes back needing you
Very occasionally something you recorded in the barn can't be applied as-is — usually because the same field was changed on a computer while you were out.
The barn wins by default — you were the one holding the animal. But HARES never quietly overwrites and never quietly drops anything: it shows you both values and asks. Look for Barn Sync Review under More, which only appears when there's something to look at.
If a change genuinely can't be sent — say it refers to an animal that's since been deleted — the Barn Mode screen tells you why and lets you discard it. It'll never sit there saying "waiting to send" forever with no explanation.
Photos in the barn
Photos you take with no signal are stored on the phone and uploaded with everything else when service returns. They can be large, so give them a moment on a weak connection.
Getting a new phone?
Open HARES with signal and let the "waiting to send" count reach zero before you delete the app off the old one. Everything else lives on our server and comes right back when you sign in — but barn work that hasn't sent yet lives only on that phone.