Obsidian Sync’s Purge process currently only purges out old attachments. When dealing with large .json or .markdown files - such as the case for Excalidraw - the purge process does not fulfill the expected goal of removing items from the remote vault to make space.
Proposed solution
Have Purge also purge the oldest versions of notes and possibly plugin settings as well.
For how far back, maybe half the duration of the “plan” version history allowance. So 2 weeks for Standard Plans, and 6 months for Plus plans.
Current workaround (optional)
The only way around this is to delete the remote vault and start over anew, which also removes all of the version history.
Yes, I second this! I don’t have a desktop OS – I use a tablet and a phone – and I have no option to manage or purge my version history, so my Sync subscription has exceeded its storage limits within a couple of weeks of use purely due to versioning (my vault is only a few MB total, only plain text files), with no way to fix it except to delete the vault entirely. Adding this to Purge would be very helpful, and setting it to half the plan version storage allowance seems like a great solution.
Strong +1 on this. I’ve got 1GB of local notes consuming 10GB of sync space. I’d love to start reaping older revisions of notes to make space for new ones.
Indeed. Frankly this is ridiculous for a paid product where a vault is only 1GB on disk and almost only text based, but ends up taking up 10GB with edits of several files of 0.5Mb each over 2 weeks - with absolutely no way to undo. Having to delete the Vault from Sync altogether and resync is a foot shooter for Obsidian - because the user will likely decide they don’t actually need Sync at all. For me it is a way to support obsidian - but not at the cost of repeated hair pulling.
They could easily fix it - allow optional shortening of the retention interval, optional increase in spacing between versions to more than about 2 types words, or allowing selective purge of individual files – or even making the existing Purge button actually work.
What is also bad is that there is absolutely no prominent warning at all of Synch errors (including a full space allocation) which leads to a complete mess by the time it is realised. This is an expensive paid product and these things could be fixed very easily I imagine.