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The reliability of terminal attendance comes from three rules working together. This page is those rules.

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The sequence

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Rule 1 — ack only after acceptance

The connector acknowledges a punch only after OnTime has returned success.The device’s flash is the retry queue. No acknowledgement means the device keeps the record and re-sends it about every 60 seconds, holding the rest of its queue behind it.
The consequence is the guarantee: an outage cannot lose a punch. OnTime being down, a deploy restarting it, a network cut — in every case the device simply keeps re-sending until it gets through. Keepalive messages are the exception: they are acknowledged immediately and forwarded without waiting, because device liveness must not depend on backend latency.

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Rule 2 — deduplicate on the triple

Because the device re-sends, OnTime will see the same punch more than once. It deduplicates on three fields together:
Why all three. The transaction ID alone is not safe — it resets when a device is wiped, so a wiped terminal would start re-issuing IDs that already exist. Including the log time closes that.
Together with rule 1 this produces at-least-once delivery, exactly-once storage. A punch cannot be missed, and cannot be double-counted.

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Rule 3 — unmapped punches park

If the terminal’s user ID does not resolve to an employee — no mapping, no matching code, or an ambiguous suffix match — the punch is parked: recorded, marked unmapped, and held.
Nothing is ever dropped. Creating the mapping later replays every parked punch for that terminal user and re-reconciles each affected day. See Map terminal users.

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What a resolved punch becomes

Once resolved, the punch becomes an ordinary attendance event: The day is then reconciled through the same day engine every other punch source uses. A terminal punch and a mobile punch produce the same kind of day record.

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Photos

If the terminal captured an image with the punch, it is stored and attached to the event as the punch photo — so it appears wherever mobile selfies do, including as evidence on a regularization.
An oversized or corrupt image is skipped and the punch still lands. Photo capture never blocks attendance.

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Terminal administration events

Enrolling or deleting a user at the device is recorded too. That gives you an enrolment audit trail, and it is the signal that a new terminal user needs mapping.

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The full picture

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What this means operationally

1

A missing punch is almost never lost

Check, in order: is the terminal user mapped, is the device online, is the connector running. Each has a distinct signature — see Troubleshooting.
2

A backed-up device queue points at the connector, not the device

The device holding records means it is not getting acknowledgements, which means the connector is not reaching OnTime — a wrong secret, or a network problem.
3

Duplicate punches are not a thing

If a person appears twice in a day report from one terminal, they punched twice.