I’m not sure if this is a bug, but it seems to be intended behavior (same as the post “Constantly having to purge synced vault?” by someone else on the Reddit)
My Obsidian vault is only about 18 MB disc space but Sync reaches the 1 GB cap about once a week—I assume due to edit history, because I edit multiple notes daily. I don’t even care about the edit history, but whenever this happens it’s a very frustrating experience because no error even appears—I only notice when I open my phone and it doesn’t have the latest edits from my computer. At that point I have to check the sync plugin, purge the vault (returning it to 18 MB), and open my computer so all my devices can sync now that the vault is purged before resuming work on my phone.
Proposed solution
As much as it would help me if Sync auto-purged the vault, there are a number of changes that sound substantially smaller, any single one of which would substantially decrease the frustration:
Option to purge vault before reaching 1GB
A prominent error message when the vault reaches 1GB
Option to disable storing edit history
Current workaround (optional)
Any of the above bullets would be great to give me a workaround
In the meantime I’ve gotten in the habit of manually opening the Sync plugin every couple days to check if it’s reached 1 GB yet
Related feature requests (optional)
I haven’t found any other resources on the internet aside from a few that don’t apply to my situation, apologies if I missed a duplicate.
Thank you very much for recognizing this as a “help” situation not a feature request after all and for your help
When you say “You should be able to purge a bit before you reach the limit,” where would I find that option? I can only find a “purge” button in Settings > Core Plugins > Sync > Storage Usage, which just shows a my storage usage unless it’s at 1 GB, in which case a Purge button appears.
Also that’s super useful to know that purge doesn’t purge MD edits. Any advice how to identify the filetypes that are filling up my vault?
I read Excalidraw causes issues of this exact sort, so I uninstalled the plugin and deleted all its files a few months ago
Once a month I record a ~500 KB audio file but delete it later
Sync is disabled for other file types
I do have 23 plugins installed but I rarely touch their settings
If Excalidraw or something messed with my vault maybe my best shot is to start over with a new vault—copying my markdown files—which I could try in the next day or so. Or is the problem likely my plugins?
In your case, when you are pruning maybe you are not pruning anything because of the thread I linked. The culprit could be Exalidraw files (because they are stored as markdown files.
You should try to delete your remote vault and begin a new one.
I agree with OP, this needs to be fixed. My files are 5.7 MiB but the storage is at 329.15 MB (54x the size of actual documents). I started a new vault 2 days ago. I have excalidraw plugin, but I have not edited an excalidraw file between now and when I started the new vault.
If the development team does not want to change anything, they should at least let us know what we are doing wrong, and what we can do to prevent the filling up of our paid 1 GB sync with completely useless data.
We are finding that certain plugins are rapidly re-writing their data.json to the the version history as well. Some as many as once a minute. These can be culprits as well.
I always recommend running a 15 minute test, and then looking at what is being edited in the sync log after the fact. If you see many data.json as a culprit, then you’d want to exclude that plugin from syncing via folder exclusions.
So if the user has plugins to sync, certain plugins will constantly update their data file. I guess that means we have to manage which plugins we are using manually on each device, fine tune the settings as we wish, and leave sync off or exclude the .obsidian file in the sync. Does this sound about right?
I still think the sync plugin is in desperate need of some TLC. Like the file recovery plugin has the ability to choose snapshot interval and history length (but these are stored locally I believe). I understand this is something that has a lot of subjectivity involved, perhaps that is why it hasn’t been implemented yet, but so does the “automatically merge” conflict resolution parameter.
If users simply had the ability to click a button and actually purge ALL previous versions of files in their vault (or a button to do a full sync and wipe previous version), your servers would probably be storing a lot less data. Or maybe to only store x number of previous versions off each device (this would be really amazing actually). In my current circumstance, the server would be storing over 50 times less data from me. This statement sounds kind of bs when I say it. I mean, it sounds unbelievable, I must be doing something critically wrong.
Would you guys not save a lot on your backend expenses?
