A simple synchronization algorithm

I am writing this article out of my experience with writing vdirsyncer, a simple synchronization program for calendar events. The same ideas can be used for file synchronization. The whole article is targeted at people who need to write some sort of "cloud synchronization" and have no idea where to start, and/or when journal-based approaches are not an option due to API restrictions.

Recap: The problem and OfflineIMAP's approach

For a start, read How OfflineIMAP works by E.Z. Yang. It deals with the synchronization algorithm used by OfflineIMAP, a program that can be used to synchronize emails between IMAP accounts and/or Maildir folders.

OfflineIMAP's algorithmic problem can be summarized as follows:

You are given two "sets" A and B of "items", where the items have immutable content and globally unique IDs. Define the function sync. If items are added to one set, then sync(A, B) should copy those items to the other set. If items are deleted from one set, those deletions should also be performed on the other set.

The presented solution involves maintaining a third set, called the status, that keeps track of the item IDs (not content) that were present after the previous sync process. On first synchronization, that set is empty.

For each item ID (from A, B, status), there are several possibilities as to which sets it is in:

This algorithm assumes that items are immutable. In order to use it with mutable items, one could declare that modified items are treated as entirely new items. If an item is changed in one set, it would be first deleted from, then created again at the other side. However elegant that approach might seem, it has two huge flaws:

The problem with mutable items

Let's restate the problem above with mutable items:

You are given two "sets" A and B of "items", where each item has a globally unique ID and mutable content. Define the function sync.

Let's also assume that there's a cheap way to determine a checksum (an etag) for each item, cheap enough to be run for all items in both sets. In the case of a file sync tool you could use file's mtimes1, or if you don't have too tight performance constraints, just hash the content of each file. The etag for an item on side A may differ from the etag of the same exact item on side B.

The algorithm

Before we create the algorithm, we need to redefine our status from a set to a mapping. Now it not only has to keep track of the item IDs, but also has to map each item ID to a tuple of two etags: One for each side of {A, B}. Here's an example:

Item ID (index) ETag A ETag B
1 771627ff caf893af
2 dc165135 07b92840

A few additional cases have to be added if the item exists on A, B, status:

image

And the following case has to be modified:

Conflict resolution

conflict_resolution is its own routine, and what it actually does depends heavily on actual usecase and the amount of knowledge your application has of the underlying data. A few options for its implementation:

What you always should do as part of conflict resolution is to check whether the item actually has different content on each side. When called the first time, the status is empty, so sync will call conflict_resolution for each item ID.


  1. The last-modified date of a file on POSIX. If you consider using that, keep in mind:

    • Depending on the OS and filesystem, mtime's precision may be insufficient. On FAT, it has only 2-second resolution, and POSIX st_mtime may vary in precision (there's also st_mtime_ns). This means that mtime-based change detection might miss some changes, as mtime after file modification is the same as the old one.
    • You can randomly touch files (updating their mtimes) without modifying their content, such that your application sees "bogus changes" in items. This might lead to more synchronization conflicts and unnecessary calls to conflict_resolution.

    Vdirsyncer uses mtimes only as an indicator that a file might have changed, and gets rid of false positives by comparing hashes of item's content.↩︎

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