The official documentation for syncing Obsidian across devices is a great place to start. If you have ideas to improve the Obsidian documentation, pull requests are welcome. You can contribute to the process of documenting Obsidian on GitHub.
First things first: Obsidian Sync vs. Third Party Sync. The advantages of Obsidian Sync is that it’s officially supported, “just works,” has nice versioning that is built into Obsidian, and is blazing fast and optimized for your vault. The main tradeoff is that Obsidian has to be running for Obsidian Sync to work, since Obsidian Sync is an Obsidian plugin, and that it can be unintuitive for people sometimes to create an empty vault and then sync their main vault “into” that empty vault – but you have to have a vault to enable the plugin on.
General tips:
- Make sure your sync service/app also syncs hidden folders (you may need to toggle it on) or
.obsidianwon’t sync, which means your plugins and themes won’t sync either. If you don’t want your plugins and themes to sync, don’t sync your.obsidian.folder. - If you want a custom font on mobile, you can Base64 encode the font into your theme. You can’t refer to other files from css snippets directly - relative links won’t work there because the files are loaded as a blob instead. Use https://transfonter.org/ to convert your font into base64, copy it in the theme file and change fonts wherever you want either in the theme file itself or through one of the plugins.
- Bi-directional syncing of a vault with two different services (i.e. Obsidian Sync & iCloud, or iCloud & Dropbox, or git + obsidian sync) is a recipe for race conditions and disaster. You’re probably fine to go from mobile to desktop with Obsidian Sync and then push and pull between desktop and laptop but you want to be really sure you aren’t creating a system where you’ve got two services fighting over which version of your file is most recent and getting itself into an infinite loop.
- Similarly, you often need a go-between if you’re trying to use third party sync between, say, an iPad and Android and a Windows or Mac computer using the desktop computer as a bridge. Most people doing that kind of cross-platform sync just use Obsidian Sync, but one user was able to share a method.
Desktop
- Users report that using iCloud to sync from iOS to Windows will cause the folders, home screens etc. on your Windows PC to not update correctly. It’s also apparently very costly on CPU capacity. A different user reports that iCloud isn’t great on Windows but the only problems they had were with large files.
Syncing via Android
- Setting up Obsidian on Android with Dropbox & Dropsync & Syncing a mobile vault with Dropsync for Dropbox on Android are both great guides for using Dropbox to sync your Obsidian files between Windows and Android. I personally use Dropsync to sync between Android and Windows and can confirm no issues). Note, though, that Dropbox struggles with some emojis while others work. Here’s an overview on emojis that sync with Dropbox.
- Syncthing is a sync app that does not rely on the cloud: it syncs two devices via wifi instead of pulling from a remote cloud copy. You have to open the Syncthing app on both devices and they’ll sync over WiFi. You can probably also “host” it on your own server to mimic a cloud effect. Note that some users report frequent conflicts.
- Here’s a guide for setting up autosync with Git on Android. Here’s another, newer one.
- You can use Google Drive on android with a third party sync app like foldersync. Here’s a guide on Discord. Here’s another one from the forum. Also, I’ve gotten reports that Autosync for Google Drive also works fine.
- Setting up Obsidian on Android with OneSync. I’ve received at least two confirmed reports of this working, but also one person who reports that it kept corrupting files and breaking, and another who reported that conflicts were common.
- The only person I know of who tested Pcloud didn’t recommend it.
Syncing on iOS
Because of system restrictions, most sync methods on iOS only work when the app is the active one on screen. ICloud doesn’t have this restriction but can cause slowdowns by offloading files that Obsidian needs, forcing it to redownload them.
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iCloud — but NOT WITH WINDOWS because of bugs that can cause data loss and duplication. People’s experience with iCloud varies — works well for some, causes slowdowns for others.
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Obsidian Sync — Obsidian’s official service, described near the start of this post.
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Remotely Save plugin which connects to various cloud services and WebDAV.
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Self-hosted LiveSync plugin.
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Git with the Working Copy iOS app or a terminal app like iSH or A-Shell. Best for the techincally-inclined and those who don’t mind syncing manually. The Git community plugin (not from the makers of git itself) adds automation but is potentially unstable on mobile, especially with larger vaults (see plugin description for details).
(IOS section updated 2024-04-02 by @CawlinTeffid.)
If you know of any resources or guides that aren’t included here, please let me know.
so not sure how to answer you 