Patent ID: 7269609

Claim:
In a distributed computing system capable of synchronizing data between distributed computing devices including work or home computers and mobile computing devices, a method of preserving memory resources at the smaller 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 method comprising 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; formatting at the local computing device the limited set of property values selected using a standard URI format that identifies the property and includes the identified time-date information associated with each selected property; and receiving at the remote device the standard URI format for the limited set of property values selected, and then storing the formatted 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 to take advantage of the unused fields to conserve memory resources at the remote device.