Manage Synchronisation Conflicts

The Desktop App uploads local changes and downloads remote changes. If a file has changed locally *and* remotely between sync runs, the Desktop app will not be able to resolve the situation on its own. A conflict file is created with the local version and the remote version is downloaded. A notification is displayed that a conflict has occurred that requires attention.

Imagine there is a file called mydata.txt in your synchronized folder. It has not changed for a while and contains the text "contents" locally and remotely. Now, at almost the same time, you update it locally to say "_local contents" while the file on the server is updated by someone else to say "_remote contents".

When you try to upload your local changes, the Desktop App will notice that the server version has also changed. This creates a conflict, and you will now have two files on your local machine:

In this situation, the mydata.txt file has the remote changes and will continue to be updated with further remote changes as they occur. Your local changes have not been sent to the server unless you have enabled Force Uploading Conflicted Files.

To resolve this conflict, open both files, compare the differences, and copy your local changes from the "conflicted copy" file to the base file, if applicable. In this example, you could change mydata.txt to say "local and remote contents" and delete the file with "conflicted copy" in its name. This will resolve the conflict.

By default, the conflict file (the file with "conflicted copy" in its name that contains your local conflicting changes) is not uploaded to the server. The idea is that you, the author of the changes, are the best person for resolving the conflict and showing the conflict to other users might create confusion.

In some scenarios, however, it makes a lot of sense to upload these conflicting changes so that local work can become visible even if the conflict isn’t resolved immediately. This can be achieved by setting the environment variable OWNCLOUD_UPLOAD_CONFLICT_FILES=1 as a startup parameter when launching the Desktop App, such as, replace the path and filename according your operating system: