## Overview

Replication relies on immutability provided by versioning to sync objects between the configured source and replication target. Replication results in the object data, metadata, last modification time and version ID all being identical between the source and target. Thus version ordering is automatically guaranteed on the source and target clusters.

### Replication of object version and metadata

## Description of `xl.meta`

`xl.meta` is a new self describing backend format used by MinIO to support AWS S3 compatible versioning.
This file is the source of truth for each `version` at rest. `xl.meta` is a msgpack file serialized from a
well defined data structure. To understand `xl.meta` here are the few things to start with