Many companies have a āno data must be saved in public cloudā policy for security reasons. If you canāt work offline in Postman and have to sync all your work into the cloud, this app is now useless for many developpers. We need a way to ānotā sync our workspace into the cloud and to be able to fully work offline or we will need to stop using the app.
8 Likes
This issue is so frustrating. All my collections are saved locally, why do I have to connect to the internet to view my workspaces. I have to disconnect from the corporate vpn before being able to access my local content. Now i have to receive OTPs again, relogin to the vpn before being able to continue working again. It is honestly a frustrating update. Please do something about this guysā¦
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Yeah, exactly my pointā¦ Why do you prevent me from accessing the data I have locally cached on my machine?
Especially because it does not stop working once it connects, itās just a āinternet at connectionā kind of thingā¦
@danny-dainton any insight into what pushed Postman toward such a system? Also, is it something that will be looked at?
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Unable to load data as youāre offline
I got the same problem, is there a way roll back to v7 ?
thanks
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Hey @wesley_zh! Welcome to the Postman Community 
You can download the latest version 7 from the link posted in this thread:
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Hey folks. Thanks for all the great feedback, and keep it coming! I work with the product design team at Postman, and I thought I could provide some perspective on where this feature is heading in the long run.
Postmanās mission is to improve your API workflows by providing collaborative tools that help maximize your efficiency. Iāll stress on the collaborative part, because workspaces are a feature that help drive this collaboration. Every feature we build on top of workspaces will be to enable these collaborative workflows.
We completely understand that some of our users cannot access online features due to restrictions imposed on them by their organizations, and there is no reason for us to not allow our non-collaborative features for you all. For this reason, we continue to support every feature that does not require collaboration or an active internet connection. With v8, the only thing thatās changed is the way we handle this. The scratch pad is meant to be inherently offline, and anything you create here stays offline and will never be confused with the online experience within workspaces. This distinction allows us to support both sets of features, without one affecting the other.
The transition to v8 for those of you who might have previously worked offline in workspaces would have been less than ideal. Youād have to export your data (https://learning.postman.com/docs/getting-started/importing-and-exporting-data/#exporting-data-dumps), and reimport it back into the Scratch Pad, but once thatās done, you should be able to work offline without any issues. If this isnāt working or is tedious for a reason that wasnāt mentioned here, weād love to hear from you and iterate on this to improve your experience.
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Hi,
I think you should differentiate between online/offline and collaborative/non-collaborative. Just because I donāt collaborate, does not mean I donāt need online and sync features. If I collaborate, does not mean I am not allowed to do anything if Iām offline.
If I do want to collaborate with other people, I would clearly create a Team Workspace. Otherwise, I would create a Personal Workspace. If I create a Personal Workspace, it means I work alone, and sometimes I would be offline, but it does not mean I donāt want the sync features. Why else would you have Personal or Team Workspace? Besides, using Scratchpad means my old multiple workspaces all have to be merged into 1 workspace, and it wonāt be synced, right?
Thatās why this online/offline decision in v8 is a big mistake, because your basic idea that ācollaboration = online and non-collaboration = offlineā is totally incorrect.
10 Likes
So the āofflineā people only get one workspace - the scratchpadā¦ Meaning that they have to lump many unrelated APIs into a single workspace and can no longer organize them in a sensible way. I fail to see how that improves my API workflow, which was already great in 7.x but pretty poor in 8.x.
I am also in agreement that the old Team/Personal workspace was clear enough in terms of ācollaborationā vs ānon-collaborationā, much clearer than the updated version which unnecessarily conflates the issue with āonlineā and āofflineā.
3 Likes
Hello, I am also facing the same issue with the postman. I also tried with scratchpad mode but once I get there it open and then black screen appears. It was working fine day before and since yesterday evening saysā¦offlineā¦ So all this days is it online or any other issue
1 Like
I work from home over crappy satellite internet which makes my VPN unstable, so there are times when Iāll end up disconnecting multiple times a day. Normally this isnāt a problem, however, with the latest 8.x updates I canāt bloody work on ANYTHING in Postman because Iām not online. I mean seriously, I canāt even change the request body? If I wanted to have to be online to use Postman, Iād sign into the web version.
THIS.
Iām the ONLY open-source developer in my department, which means collaboration is virtually non-existent. If I donāt care one whit about collaborating with other people, why on Earth would I want to be FORCED to use some ācollaboration modeā that REQUIRES me to be online?
Do none of you guys use local Docker containers to run dev APIs? I donāt care if I canāt get to yahoo.com when Iām trying to test a local server!
Not allowing me to make edits to my tests is not actually helpful, guys.
Knowingly forcing users to jump through hoops to try to get back expected application behavior isnāt helpful either.
Why do we have to do this? Why was this backwards-incompatible regression allowed as a feature? This is a serious UI/UX faux pas when during NORMAL operation we suddenly lose access to our existing data. Even worse, instead of having a nice little button that says āhey, would you like to import your existing stuff into the scratchpad?ā, we ALL have to go through the SAME annoying import/export mechanism nonsense to keep our code, and THEN do it all over again to get it back up into a usable workspace. Itās the same steps each time, so why the heck do we have to deal with this manually?
- USERS should be able to make the choice between personal/collaborative workspaces.
- USERS should be the ones to decide whether or not our tests should be backed up to the cloud.
- USERS should be able to work locally offline without having to manually juggle importing/exporting collections and re-setting up environments/variables
Postman is awesome. Getting new features in Postman is awesome. Having tools to make it easier to work with remote peers is also awesome.
Being unilaterally forced to use this new mandatory āalways onlineā paradigm with no say so, especially when it only makes my job harder, is most definitely the exact opposite of awesome.
10 Likes
The scratch pad is meant to be inherently offline, and anything you create here stays offline and will never be confused with the online experience within workspaces
I believe thatās not a solution for our issue here. If I work within a team, with shared workspaces, as long as I donāt come online, I canāt access the workspaces, even though they may be cached on my machine.
I donāt mind if my workspace does not update, perfectly fine, I donāt mind either if you tell me that any change to the workspace will not be saved and uploaded, or merged once online - fair game.
Just let me access, and use them.
To me itās like a soft-lock, because I can open Postman outside the VPN, and connect to the VPN again when it has verified i was online. Instead of forcing to download the new workspace, just allow us to open the version of it we have on our machine, and let us know that āThis workspace may be outdated and changes may not be saved onlineā or something like thisā¦
4 Likes
Iām facing this issue tooā¦ Itās been a nightmare
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So, my ADSL line went down. Could I continue working with Postman in my local machine environment (rhetorical question)? This is really a problem.
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Could you expand on the reasons why you feel using the Scratch Pad is pointless - If you elaborate more on your context and current workflow, it will help us to better understand.
Wow, I really admire your politeness and diplomacy 
And to all the people whinging about Version 8 not working? How would you feel if someone commented on your software along the lines of āOh, your software is useless. It doesnāt workā.
No further explanation, just a pointless rant. Wouldnāt you feel a bit p*ssed off?
4 Likes
I agree that it is certainly not helpful to rant and complain without giving constructive feedbackā¦ I also understand why all these people are angry, it seems like a use-case has been completely overlooked in the v7 ā v8 upgrade.
As I struggled with the same issue, and ultimately had to revert back to 7, I will try to summarize to make the feedback useful:
For many systems on enterprise networks, outgoing data is not allowed, and is blocked by firewalls or proxies. For some this is only while on VPN, but for others using strictly enterprise devices, this block cannot be avoided (which is my scenario). While previously you could still create collections, intercept requests and cookies, etc. while āofflineā, much of that has been restricted with v8.
Scratch Pad allows some of the functionality again, but is lacking in many areas that were still available in version 7. I donāt use Postman for many complicated things, but the one area missing for me with Scratch Pad was the request/cookie interceptor, which I regularly used in v7 and had become a core part of several of my collections for testing endpoints. Iām sure there are other restrictions, but this one alone was enough to force me to downgrade to v7 again.
To summarize some feedback that I would love to see, but I understand you all are busy and have priorities:
- Scratch Pad is somewhat difficult to findā¦ It might be helpful, instead of just showing the āIt appears that youāre offlineā error and showing nothing, maybe also showing the option to switch to Scratch Pad to work offline?
- It would be nice for some of the previous tools (such as the interceptor) to work even when using Scratch Pad
- This one is incredibly minor, but the Scratch Pad mode notification is very bright and blatant, and there is no way to dismiss it as far as I could tellā¦ It would be nice to be able to close it, even if it starts open any time you open Postman
Thank you for all the hard work that you do; Postman is a really incredible toolā¦ I like the way v8 looks; Iām really hoping Iāll be able to use it at work sometime in the future 
6 Likes
Thank you so much @monstro222 for penning this down.
I would suggest adding all feature requests on our issue tracker:
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I encountered the same problem, closing and opening the application didnāt work. But I found out there were some processes of Postman running in the background. Stopping them in the Task Manager solved the problem, it worked after I tried to start the application again.
1 Like
As long as I donāt come online, I canāt access the workspaces, even though they may be available on my machine
I downgraded to version 7.
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Hello
So after one of our Business Architects had the same issue she contacted me and we found out in the proxy logs that Postman was generating traffic to different URLs when launching it
If content inspection was turned on on these pages Postman failed and was in offline mode.
We made an exception on HTTPS Content Inspection on below URLs and Postman (version 8) started working:
*.getpostman.com dl.postman.io *.gw.postman.com *.postmanlabs.com
Not very practical to make such exceptions for postman to workā¦ Could you check this and maybe fix so it can work properly on company networks that have a Proxy (like most do)
Because all our other users of Postman have not upgraded to V8 and have not faced this issue yet. So it shows that this is something new that was introduced with this version that is incompatible with Proxiesā¦
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