Manage Synchronisation Conflicts

The ownCloud Desktop App uploads local changes and downloads remote changes. When a file has changed on the local and on the remote side between synchronization runs, the Desktop App will be unable to resolve the situation on its own. It will create a conflict file with the local version, downloads the remote version and notifies the user that a conflict occurred which needs attention.

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

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

In this situation the file mydata.txt has the remote changes (and will continue to be updated with further remote changes when they happen), but your local adjustments have not been sent to the server (unless the server enables conflict uploading, see below).

The Desktop App notifies you of this situation via system notifications, the system tray icon and a yellow "unresolved conflicts" badge in the account settings window. Clicking this badge shows a list that includes the unresolved conflicts and clicking one of them opens an explorer window pointing at the relevant file.

To resolve this conflict, open both files, compare the differences and copy your local changes from the "conflicted copy" file into the base file where applicable. In this example you might change mydata.txt to say "local and remote contents" and delete the file with "conflicted copy" in its name. With that, the conflict is resolved.

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.

However, in some scenarios it makes a lot of sense to upload these conflicting changes such that local work can become visible even if the conflict won’t be resolved immediately.

In the future there might be a server-wide switch for this behavior. For now, it can already be tested by setting the environment variable: OWNCLOUD_UPLOAD_CONFLICT_FILES = 1.