Embodiments disclosed herein provide systems, methods, and computer readable media for generating a consistent deduplicated snapshot of a distributed database using optimistic deduplication. In a particular embodiment, a method provides, for each node of a plurality of nodes in the distributed database, deduplicating data items stored on the node that are owned by the node and generating a summary that describes a file in which the data items are located. The method further provides identifying from the summaries for each of the nodes whether mistakes occurred during deduplication and, upon identifying one or more mistakes, determining one or more corrections for the one or more mistakes. Also, the method provides generating a consistent deduplicated snapshot for the distributed database comprising the deduplicated data items from each node and the one or more corrections.