What is an One-Way Sync?

One-way sync is simpler to reason about and implement than bidirectional sync because there's only ever one direction of truth: the source system's data is authoritative, and destinations are treated as read replicas or derived copies that get overwritten or updated to match. This avoids an entire category of conflict-resolution problems that bidirectional sync has to solve, what happens when the same record is edited in both systems at once, because in a one-way setup, that scenario simply can't occur; edits made directly in the destination will eventually be overwritten by the next sync from the source. The tradeoff is that one-way sync isn't suitable when users legitimately need to edit data in the destination system and have those edits persist and propagate elsewhere, for that, bidirectional sync, with its added conflict-handling complexity, is required. One-way sync is most appropriate for reporting mirrors, backups, and any scenario where the destination is meant to be a read-only reflection of the source.