Patent ID: 7305423

Claim:
In a distributed computing system capable of synchronizing data between distributed computing devices including work or home computers and mobile computing devices, a computer program product for implementing a method of preserving memory resources at a smaller computing device including a mobile computing device which has limited physical resources for storing data and thus is incapable of maintaining time-date information for all properties of a data structure item that is to be synchronized with other local computing systems, the computer program product comprising a computer-readable storage medium containing computer executable instructions for implementing the method, and wherein the method is comprised of the acts of receiving at a local computing device a plurality of property values from a remote device with limited physical resources for storing data; selecting at the local computing device a limited set of property values from among the plurality of property values based on the available resources of the remote device; identifying at the local computing device a set of time-date information corresponding to the limited set of property values selected; receiving at the remote device the limited set of property values selected, and then storing the time-date information in one or more unused fields of a remote database of the remote device, the one or more unused fields comprising any property field not reserved for storing time-date information in order take advantage of the unused fields to conserve memory resources at the remote device; identifying a portion of time-date information for one or more remaining property values that are not in the limited set of property values, and the identified portion of time-date information corresponding to when at least one of the one or more remaining property values where modified by a user; and storing the identified portion of time-date information in one location in the remote database such that the identified portion of time-date information corresponds to all of the one or more remaining property values.