Settings Sync

    You can turn on Settings Sync using the Turn On Preferences Sync… entry in the Manage gear menu at the bottom of the Activity Bar.

    You will be asked to sign in and what preferences you would like to sync; currently Settings, Keyboard Shortcuts, Extensions, User Snippets, and UI State are supported.

    Selecting the Sign in & Turn on button will ask you to choose between signing in with your Microsoft or GitHub account.

    After making this selection, the browser will open so that you can sign in to your Microsoft or GitHub account. When a Microsoft account is chosen, you can use either personal accounts, such as Outlook accounts, or Azure accounts, and you can also link a GitHub account to a new or existing Microsoft account.

    Configuring synced data

    Machine settings (with or machine-overridable scopes) are not synchronized by default, since their values are specific to a given machine. You can also add or remove settings you want to this list from the Settings editor or using the setting .

    Keyboard Shortcuts are synchronized per platform by default. If your keyboard shortcuts are platform-agnostic, you can synchronize them across platforms by disabling the setting sync.keybindingsPerPlatform.

    All built-in and installed extensions are synchronized along with their global enablement state. You can skip synchronizing an extension, either from the Extensions view () or using the setting sync.ignoredExtensions.

    Following UI State is synchronized currently:

    • Display Language
    • Panel entries
    • Views layout and visibility
    • Recently used commands
    • Do not show again notifications

    You can always change what is synced via the Preferences Sync: Configure command or by opening the Manage gear menu, selecting Preferences Sync is On, and then Preferences Sync: Configure.

    Conflicts

    • Accept Local: Selecting this option will overwrite remote settings in the cloud with your local settings.
    • Accept Remote: Selecting this option will overwrite local settings with remote settings from the cloud.

    If at any time you want to sync your data to a different account, you can turn off and turn on Settings Sync again with different account.

    Restoring data

    VS Code always stores local backups of your preferences while syncing and provides remote and local sync backup views for accessing your remote and local backup data respectively. In case something goes wrong, you can access these views using commands Preferences Sync: Show Synced Data and Preferences Sync: Show Local Backup and restore your data.

    Local backups folder in the disk can be accessed via the Preferences Sync: Open Local Backups Folder command. The folder is organized by the type of preference and contains versions of your JSON files named with a timestamp of when the backup occurred. These backups are automatically deleted after 30 days.

    Reporting issues

    Settings Sync activity can be monitored in the Log (Preferences Sync) output view. If you experience a problem with Settings Sync, please include this log when creating the issue. If your problem is related to authentication, also include the log from the Account output view.

    If you want to remove all your data from our servers, just turn off sync via the Manage gear menu and select the checkbox to clear all cloud data. If you choose to re-enable sync, it will be as if you’re signing in for the first time.

    Next steps

    Common questions

    Settings Sync persists authentication information to the system keychain. Writing to the keychain can fail in some cases if the keychain is misconfigured.

    Linux

    If the keychain throws the error “No such interface “org.freedesktop.Secret.Collection” on object at path /org/freedesktop/secrets/collection/login”, try following the steps described in to create a new keyring.