I recently wanted to purchase the sync feature of OBSIDIAN, but I have been worried about using the same settings for page layout settings and plug-in settings for both PC and cell phones.
The main reason is that my PC is windows system and my phone is IOS system. I used to use iCloud sync and there would be problems with the page layout. I used the plugin Sliding Panes (Andy’s Mode) on my PC and the page panning function worked very well on the PC. But when I open obsidian on mobile, I need to turn off Sliding Panes(Andy’s Mode) plugin, or I need to set Leaf Width to a smaller number to make sure the page width fits the mobile screen size. After that, when you open obsidian on PC, you need to adjust Sliding Panes(Andy’s Mode) plugin again, which will be more troublesome.
So I’d like to ask , after using the obsidian sync feature, is it possible to keep the page layout settings and plug-in settings of PC and cell phone set independently?
You can use different config folders for different device types. That way you can have completely different setups. Go to About, Config folder.
@dknight212’s advice is accurate. In addition, when using Sync, you can opt to sync everything but plugin status, or plugin config settings. In other words, you can tell Sync not to synchronize which plugins you’ve enabled, and/or you can tell it not to sync your plugin settings. There’s a set of toggles for this in Preferences → Sync, once you’ve set syncing up.
Thanks, @ryanjamurphy I’d forgotten you can do that. That model is probably best when you’re only concerned with two different devices and not groups of devices. In my case, I have two Android devices which share settings and two Windows computers which share.
Thank you so much for your patient answers, I can now go ahead and open the sync feature with confidence, thank you!
Thank you for your reply, I have one more question to ask. I am using onedrive’s sync function. Can I keep my notes in my onedrive files after I enable the sync function of obsidian?
Because I want to keep the backup function of onedrive, will it affect the sync function of obsidian?
This is generally a bad idea.
If you never edit the files outside of Obsidian, and if you never touch the files in OneDrive otherwise, you might get away with it.
However, if a change is recognized by both OneDrive’s and Obsidian’s sync engines, and both try to save the sync down onto other devices, they will try to race each other. This sometimes leads to conflicts and data loss.
Thanks for your reply, may I ask how you do the backup?
On one hand, I have a lot of important information and notes recorded in obsidian now, and I want to get a timely backup.
On the other hand, I have a concern, I am in China now, and in China sometimes some websites are blocked for unknown reasons, so assuming the obsidian sync function is blocked by Chinese network in the future, I would like to be able to get timely backup.
There are many ways of doing backups. Be careful of the difference between a sync service like OneDrive and a backup service.
I follow the 3-2-1 backup philosophy: three total copies, where two are local and one is offsite.
I have my notes on my Mac. I use a macOS automation tool called Keyboard Maestro to regularly copy those notes onto an external drive. And I use the (paid) Backblaze service linked above to keep an off-site backup of my entire Mac and the external drives with them.
So, basically, copy your notes to a different disk on a regular basis, and copy them into a backup service on a regular basis. You can use OneDrive for the latter, but—importantly—you shouldn’t actively work on your notes in OneDrive if that’s your backup solution. (This is because if you make a change to the notes that you want to roll back, you can’t use your OneDrive “backup,” because it will have synced the change you made!) So, to restate, you can use a service like OneDrive as a backup, but do so by copying your files into OneDrive, not by working on your files while they’re being synced with OneDrive.
It is a bit nuanced, but the specifics are important!
Thank you very, very much, you explained it very clearly, thanks!
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