2.7 KiB
Conflicts
conflicts
Overview
The Nextcloud desktop client uploads local changes and downloads remote changes. When a file has changed on the local side and on the remote between synchronization runs the client will be unable to resolve the situation on its own. It will create a conflict file with the local version, download the remote version and notify the user that a conflict occured which needs attention.
Example
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 client will notice that the server version has also changed. It creates a conflict and you will now have two files on your local machine:
mydata.txt
containing "remote contents"mydata (conflicted copy 2018-04-10 093612).txt
containing "local contents"
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 client 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.
Uploading conflicts (experimental)
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
.