One embodiment of a system comprises a client device and a remote content management system. The client device comprises a synchronization manager that maintains a remote virtual model that models a synchronization state of a remote peer resource at the content management system and a local virtual model that models a synchronization state of a local peer resource in the local file system. The synchronization manager determines that the remote peer resource and local peer resource are out of sync based on a comparison of the remote virtual model and the local virtual model and synchronizes changes from the local cache to the content management system to update the remote peer resource or synchronizes changes from the content management system to update the local peer resource.