I’m thrilled to have stumbled upon Obsidian for a variety of reasons, chief of which is the quick sync between my devices–for daily note-taking I switch between a personal macbook air, personal imac, my iphone, and a windows pc for work, and until now I was switching between emailing myself (on the work laptop) and a handful of apps w/ iCloud, Dropbox, etc., on the other three.
However, I’m confused about the local storage aspect here–is there really no way to avoid copying my entire personal vault onto local storage whenever I want to pull up Obsidian on my work computer and add a quick note? For obvious reasons I’d prefer not to host a directory of text files detailing my personal projects and notes on a laptop I don’t actually own.
It seems like the only workaround is to ‘exclude’ the majority of my folders from the sync, but this doesn’t appear to be device-specific, so it doens’t actually solve my issue b/c I couldn’t sync those folders between personal devices, either.
You could make a separate vault for work. Or consider it a scratchpad / inbox vault. And daily or weekly, you could move those notes into your full vault. On your work computer, only sync that work vault.
But otherwise, yeah Obsidian is meant to be local. It’s explicitly in the tagline on the front page, and one of the main selling points for me personally:
Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.
And, depending on your sync set up, you could nest it in your main vault on your personal devices but sync only that sub-vault onto your work device. There’s a lot of flexibility available in how you set things up, so long as you can be clear about exactly what you want to achieve.
Even if you could just log in to Obsidian to add a note, I think doing personal stuff on a work computer is a bad idea. If you need to make a quick note, use your phone.