Disclosed is a method to synchronize the state of an application and an application's objects with data stored on the storage system. The storage system provides API's to create special data, called a marker journal, and stores it on a journal volume. The marker contains application information, e.g. file name, operation on the file, timestamp, etc. Since the journal volume contains markers as well as any changed data in the chronological order, IO activities to the storage system and application activities can be synchronized.