Disable auto-save or change frequency

Feature requests
34

I agree wholeheartedly that this is a sorely lacking feature, but…

I now believe that Obsidian’s functionality is closely tied to the auto-save. It does a lot of different things during saving that are intended to feel seamless to the user, and at least a few of them would break badly if the loaded note were to remain out of sync with the note file’s contents. That’s my impression anyway, now that I’ve written a decently involved plugin for Obsidian.

One workaround, for people who are really struggling with the constant saving, would be to put your vault onto a RAM disk, then copy it back to the hard-disk whenever you really want to save.

I’ve done this, and it works better than you’d expect! Here’s how I did it on windows.

  1. I setup a ram disk:
    1. I installed the open-source software ImDisk Toolkit.
    2. I made the new start menu item “Mount Image File” easy to run. Then I ran it.
    3. In the window that pops up, I clicked the “Switch to Driver Interface” button at the bottom left.
    4. I set the “Size of virtual disk” to 250mb (it’s a safe bet for MY vault anyway)
    5. I set the “Device type” to “Harddisk volume”
    6. I clicked the ok button and… bam! A new hard-disk made entirely of ram.
  2. I copied the vault I wanted to work with onto the ram disk.
  3. I opened the vault from the ram disk.
  4. I setup the ability to quickly and easily save my changes using “xcopy”.
    1. I opened CMD (a command-line window).
    2. I navigated (using the CD command) to within the vault’s folder on my ram disk.
    3. I typed this command:
      • xcopy . {path to the vault folder on the real hard-disk} /s /d /e /f /y
    4. I tested it by running it again (just hit the up arrow key, then enter), noting that no files were copied. I then changing one note in the vault and ran it again, confirming that the single note was copied.

FYI, that long xcopy command includes flags to ensure that the only files that are copied are the ones that are newer on the ram-disk than on the real hard-disk.

Also, if you are handy, you can create a batch script to run that xcopy command, rather than needing to remember it.

Hope that helps. If you are on Linux or Mac, the steps are similar, but you’d use different software and command.

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