I spend a lot of time organizing my notes using things like file colors and icons, but lately I’ve been getting really frustrated by competing syncs on my devices replacing one another’s plugin settings. Syncing settings all appear to be two-directional, where in order for a device to download settings from my cloud, they also are given permission to upload their own settings. Is there a way to make a device sync settings from the cloud without allowing it to send changes to the cloud?
Am I misunderstanding what the sync toggles mean? If I disable syncing of certain content, does the device still download and apply settings from the cloud, or does it isolate entirely?
Solving the issue per-plugin seems to involve learning the correct rituals that need to be performed every single time I open Obsidian to ensure nothing breaks. That sort of hokey-pokey nonsense is disruptive and I don’t feel like living in fear that I’ll open Obsidian on my iPad for the first time in months and lose all of my curated settings over that time because I forgot to sacrifice a goat and utter the magic words before editing a note.
At this point it would be easier to figure out the solution I described above where I tell devices to match my cloud, but don’t give them permission to make specific types of changes (to icons or folder colors or whatever).
Things I have tried
On on a previous attempt, I had to open all four of my devices, open Obsidian on each, close Obsidian, then reopen it again. If I didn’t reopen, the old settings would be sent back with any unrelated changes I made. I’ve found myself repeatedly updating colors all year because they keep resetting back to zero, and it’s because I don’t open/close/open on my phone every single time.
I’m not looking for plugin-specific solutions and am aware those should be directed towards their own community maintained bug reporting. I’ve tried several posted solutions with no luck, which is why I’m looking into the generic fix now.
No, in Obsidian Sync, plugin sync is either
2-way or off.
But you may be running into this issue: plugin settings pulled in by Sync (or otherwise changed from outside the settings panel) don’t apply until the app has been reloaded. Troubleshoot Obsidian Sync - Obsidian Help
So if you make changes on one device, they get pulled in on another device but you don’t restart the app, you may end up saving an old version of the settings, which then gets synced back.
Unfortunately this can require careful attention to manage.
Are there any macros I can set up to open, lock editing, wait for settings sync, close, and reopen automatically every time I launch Obsidian? Or just some starting point for modifying the launch procedure? I guess that might be more of an OS specific question.
The idea that certain plugins will always fail if I don’t do that manually every single time is really disheartening for such an otherwise robust application. I could see waiting a few seconds for that process to complete itself, but it’s a near certainty that I’m going to continue wiping weeks and months of settings simply by opening the app like I would any other app. There are zero other apps on any of my devices that require that double load.
It’s a little frustrating that the FAQ describes “primary” and “secondary” devices, yet admits there’s nothing to enforce that pattern.
There are few plugins which kind of relates to having different settings synced/coordinated amongst different devices, but I’ve not found one in particular I like.
On a related note though, you’re given the opportunity to have some different settings related to mobile versus desktop, and if you want you can define which folder is used for configuration on a given device.
The latter you can do in Settings > Files and Link > Override configuration folder`. If you change that on either of your devices, you’ll completely disconnect it from the other configuration folder. This means that you could sync the entire vault from both devices, and its configuration is untouched. However, this also mean that you need to manually do the same changes to your configuration in both (or all) places if you do a configuration change. (Hence the need for the some sync/coordination plugins like I started the post with.)
You can also, if using Obsidian Sync, toggle off syncing of plugin settings — which, again, requires setting them manually on each device.
I suspect at least some of this is possible for a plugin/and or external automation to do (maybe different things available to each), tho I don’t know if one exists.
wait, so what exactly is the necessary ritual to prevent these ‘wrong-way’ syncing of plugin settings? every time i think i’ve cracked the magic code i inevitably find myself with all my settings wiped once again a few days later
My partial solution was to make a macro that opens a new tab and jumps to a page that screams at me in TITLE TEXT to close and reopen. I’ve done my part upon seeing that, but I’ve still managed to occasionally lose iterations of settings. Icons seem to be persisting, but the file colors that I use to distinguish quality and completion of given notes gets wiped once in a while (like today). You could probably just set the homepage to a page like that.
My guess for why it failed is that I closed and reopened Obsidian before my wifi or phone had properly connected to the internet, or maybe some part of the sync was still in progress (hard to tell sometimes), and assumed I was safe. In other words, I may have completed the ritual while nobody was watching, and the gods gave me no credit for it.
I genuinely don’t know, and I’m still annoyed beyond belief that I have to do anything at all to make the sync actually sync. From my perspective, syncing is an incomplete feature despite also being the main feature. I know the typical defense is to say that Obsidian’s not responsible for community plugins, but all of the plugins I’m observing work on all platforms, and their data persists even when it can’t be displayed (like icons). From my understanding, it’s a flow issue where the new settings are downloaded but their existence doesn’t queue up a forced update to apply them.
Obsidian needs some way to detect if settings have changed, and to queue up a close/reopen or reapply process automatically. Not sure if that would work with multiple instances of the app opened at once across different devices though.
For the moment, ritual is the only fix aside from not using cool community plugin toys.
Dang, I apparently lost a depressing swathe of organization across files I’ve touched in the last month or so. It’s almost not worth using Obsidian on some of my devices because of how infrequently I update them and how many of my settings might revert if I use them again. Might be safer to just enter new notes using a generic application, then convert them to Obsidian when I get home.
