iCloud Selective Sync
Your Obsidian vault has thousands of notes. Your iPhone should have dozens.
- If you use iCloud Drive to store your vault, you already know the problem: iCloud syncs everything or nothing. It has no concept of selective sync. Symlinks do not work — iCloud ignores them. Having the entire Vault on iCloud means moving it to some obscure folder on the Mac, and does not allow you to choose what to sync.
- Obsidian Sync costs dollars per year and still syncs your entire vault - and implies privacy issues too. There is no built-in way to say “I only want my daily notes and my reading list on my phone, not my 40,000 archive notes and my 2GB of PDFs.”
iCloud Selective Sync solves this at the plugin level. You mark folders in your vault with a single line of YAML frontmatter. The plugin copies only those folders — and nothing else — into your iCloud Drive location, where the Obsidian iOS app picks them up. Changes made on your phone flow back automatically. The rest of your vault stays local.
No subscription. No third-party sync service. No command line scripts to maintain.
Here is the link:
Have fun with it!