The above were two old posts of mine where I was struggling/trying to figure out how best to approach tablet work with lots of converted files in my new environment.
Since then, I know a little bit more.
Unfortunately, a large vault doesn’t really work a hundred percent well in the latest updated versions of Obsidian mobile, either. Not only does it take a long time to open the vault, the app has a way of exiting itself easily. Moderators think it’s the RAM (of an older device). I think there are some other issues there as well (possibly to do with folder structure and caching – I am no developer, of course).
So it came that almost a full year passed and I tried coming back to the original idea, namely cutting up the vault into smaller pieces (in my case, folders A-Z). An off-the-cuff half-hearted effort on my part looked like this:
In the hours that followed that post, at least I managed to find a working solution (which doesn’t need a jailbreak but it certainly makes it a little smoother).
Basically, after syncing (in my case: with GitHub) that is pulling data down, I move all my subfolders (now equipped with their own settings in their own .obsidian folders, which I set up on desktop) up one level so they’ll all be on the same root/vault level path (Obsidian on iOS only lets you do that): where the main vault sits.
One can do it using A-Shell (first accessing the Obsidian container with pickfolder-jump commands) and even automate it all with iOS shortcuts.
Then when the work on mobile is done, move all folders back to the main vault and now you can sync (in my case, I use git).
First I used the Filza (JB) app to do the moving but now I use the shortcuts (in my case, it was very easy because regex [A-Z]
matched and took care of moving all my A, B, C…Z named folders).
In the meantime, I set up other shortcuts to access the temporary vaults and their files. The experience is really good. Switching vaults is really fast (moving a lot of files beforehand was equally really fast – don’t move files in the iOS Files app, that’s rubbish).
If you want to follow in my suit, I just need to remind you that first you need to set things up by creating the dummy folders (with the same name that your prospective subfolders have, obviously) in Obsidian, then quit Obsidian, delete the dummies (in Files app, if that’s what you have), then do the moving, and enjoy.