What the trial does to your data

SPSync’s download is a full, 14-day trial: every feature works, against your own tenant, with no row or item limits. That is deliberate: you should be able to prove the sync actually works before buying a licence. The trade-off, also deliberate, is that trial data is not production data: it is visibly and reproducibly corrupted so it can never pass for the real thing.

The rule in full

On every run, while in trial mode:

• A random selection of rows in each destination table (about one row in five (20%), chosen again on every run) is altered:
  • Every text column’s value on that row becomes ~~TRIAL~~ <original value>.
  • Every number column’s value on that row becomes -999999.
• Dates, booleans, and every key or metadata column (row ids, lookup key columns, timestamps, the columns joins depend on) are left untouched. Joins between tables, and to the shared users table, keep working as they do on clean data.
• A trial_corrupted column is added to every list table so you can see, row by row, which rows were altered, and so a report can filter tainted rows out with a plain WHERE NOT trial_corrupted.
• Which rows get altered is different on every run (so you cannot “get lucky” and hit an all-clean run), but reproducible for the same run: if you need to debug or demo a specific run’s output, the same run always taints the same rows.

You will see a banner naming this on every screen of the desktop app, in every spsync run/reconcile output, and in the run log, along with your trial’s expiry date:

Trial: about one row in five is marked TRIAL or -999999; activate a licence to sync clean data. Expires <date>.

spsync licence status prints the same state at any time (“Trial, N days left”, “Licensed”, or “Trial ended, contact us”) without running anything; the desktop app’s status bar and Settings screen show it too.

Trial expiry

Your trial period is 14 days from the first time you run SPSync on a machine, recorded locally on that machine. Turning your clock back does not extend it, because the trial’s start date is fixed the first time it is recorded, so “expires” is always measured from that fixed point, not from whatever the clock says today.

Once the 14 days are up, run and reconcile stop: each attempt is refused with a message naming the date the trial ended and a link to book a call so we can issue a licence. Nothing is deleted and nothing else changes: discover, doctor, licence status and the desktop app keep working so you can still see your connections, lists and destinations, and your replicated tables stay where they are (still marked). There is no free tier: SPSync is either in its trial or licensed.

Activating a licence

Enter a licence key at any point (during the trial or after it has ended) and the next run reconciles every list in full: every previously-tainted row is rewritten with a clean value read straight from SharePoint. No reinstall, and no re-sync of data that had not changed. The trial_corrupted column itself stays in your schema (SPSync’s schema evolution only ever adds columns, never drops one in place) but every row’s value settles to false and stays there.