Hello everyone. I could use some advice and insight as a sophisticated macOS/iOS Evernote user is looking to jump ship over to Obsidian.
To provide a quick overview of my Evernote (EN) uses coming over to Obsidian, I am using these note management tools for two purposes - GTD and personal knowledge management. Focusing in on two main EN notebooks - they are Tasks and Knowledge_Library. I leverage a few dozen tags in a hierarchy that express actions, priorities, relative when’s (now, later, soon, etc) along with contexts (personal, business, etc).
In total, there are over 5,000 notes.
To date, I have imported into a local Obsidian vault the two ENEX files and have tailored the Obsidian environment with various plugins such as Tag Wranger, Templater, Tasks, and Multi Properties.
My issue is sync’ing with iCloud. I can’t get my vault open on iCloud.
I created an empty vault to my iCloud Drive from my iPhone. (I have more than enough space on my iCloud Drive.). I copied the various Obsidian folders on my Mac to the iCloud Drive location where the empty Obsidian vault is located.
When I open Obsidian on my iPhone, it just cycles through the startup steps.
What am I doing wrong? Are the number of notes choking Obsidian?
I’m sorry but what do you mean by this, more precisely ?
What does the screen say when you try to open Obsidian on your phone ?
And as a non-Evernote user () what are the 2 ENEX files you’re talking about ?
In the sense that Obsidian only reads .md notes (although other types of files can be stored in a vault. They just won’t be editable) …
So I was wondering if that could be an issue (?)
Something you could check, in iCloud Drive on mobile is if your files are effectively downloaded and accessible locally before opening Obsidian …
ENEX files are the Evernote notes in a format that the Importer plugin can convert for importing into Obsidian. That process overall worked with proof being able to view those imported notes in the local Obsidian vault.
The answer to your first question has changed. Last night, it was cycling through “Loading plugins…”. I let that run for 10 minutes before deciding the app must be hung and swiped it up to close. This morning, the vault opens to a note. However, there is rotating circle in the upper left. Since I left it alone, it eventually went to a cycling of “Loading workspace…”.
Following the idea of checking on the iPhone if the files have been copied, each of the two folder containing notes (Tasks and Knowledge_Library) have cloud icons with down arrows . Pressing and holding on each folder shows three download option of Remove Download, Download Now, and Keep Downloaded.
Am I just being impatient? All the videos I saw on how to do this started with clean vaults or used one note to show the sync speed. I brought over 5K+ notes. Is iCloud simply still copying files to the iPhone and Obsidian Mobile simply not done indexing - where both processes leave me blind on progress?
Obsidian works with the files accessible locally …
So, if you vault isn’t downloaded on your device from iCloud (i.e.: if it shows the “cloud icon + the down arrow”) when you open Obsidian, it will have to download all these files, in the background, before doing anything else (indexing, load your plugins, etc…).
As iCloud can be capricious/slow… yes, downloading 5K+ notes could take some time .
(Although, some of these 5K+ notes have probably been downloaded already… but not necessarily all)
What you could do, is download your vault on your phone, via the Files app before opening Obsidian and if you can, activate the Keep downloaded feature on the Obsidian folder (so your files will be always available locally to Obsidian when you need to open it on your phone) …
Thank you for providing some more context regarding the ENEX files (TIL)
You are thanking me?! I’m sorry but I’m the one who is thankful for the insight.
Let me push my luck a little. If I place an md file on my Mac via Finder in a folder with other md files within the Obsidian vault folder structure, will Obsidian see it? Or do I need to bring in the md file via Obsidian so it can index it?
Conversely, if I delete md files via Finder or with iOS’ Files app, will Obsidian know or do I need to remove files in Obsidian so the index is updated accordingly?
Thanks again Pch.
p.s. To shed a little bit of light on the Evernote-to-Obsidian export/import process I went through, my tags in Evernote use a parent:child format in its naming convention - examples: Action:Read, When:Soon, Priority:Critical. Colons are not allowed in Obsidian tags.
To convert all the tags so that I had the forward slash in place of the colon, I used the following macOS terminal command I learned from Copilot:
sed -E ‘s/(.?):(.?<\\/tag>)/\1\/\2/g’ input.enex > output.enex
I am not an expert in Terminal. I would even hardly call myself a beginner. However, based on my experience using the DOS prompt and my VAX/VMS days, I’m not afraid to use it given the proper guidance. It not only worked like a charm but was blazing fast. It took literally a blink of an eye to go through the 3+ gig ENEX file (which is markup language variant) containing thousands of notes.
This is one of the Obsidian aspects I like. The notes are just markdown/text files.
Yes … But it might not know “directly” what happened …
Generally speaking, it’s better to change “things” (create/delete a .md file, rename one, move a file from a folder to another, etc…) from Obsidian so Obsidian can do what it has to do to and stay “up-to-date” with what’s going on in your vault (For example, updating internal links after renaming a note) …
It doesn’t mean you can’t do it (after all, those are your files)… It’s just better if done from Obsidian
) what are the 2 ENEX files you’re talking about ?
…
(TIL)