#1

The official documentation for Obisidian Mobile 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 .obsidian won’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

Syncing on iOS

If you know of any resources or guides that aren’t included here, please let me know.

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#2
#3

Eleanor, I sync Windows 10 to Android phone, both ways, using FolderSync app on phone syncing to OneDrive. Only minor conflicts, mainly related to .obsidian. stuff. No document/notes issues. This works syncing both ways phone to pc, phone to laptop, phone to tablet.

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#4

Hey, there is a Synology server in my family. I use it to synchronize between win devices perfectly. The problem now is that there is no good solution for the mobile terminal. The problem is that my Synology opens the WebDAV port, but the Obsidian on my phone does not support linking WebDAV. I don’t know if there are plans to open WebDAV links in the future.

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#5

Eleanor,

Regarding Syncthing, it can sync both locally (i.e. over WiFi or other networks) and through the Internet. The way you wrote it in your OP is as if it only supports local synchronisation. It might bring some confusion.

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#6

Syncthing works like a charm. No conflicts for me. Lots of options, easy to set ignore lists (for .obsidian, etc). Very transparent about what it’s doing as it syncs, if you watch the web GUI.

You can opt for Syncthing to handle your file versioning, but I haven’t tried it.

It works best if you have at least one always-on device. Using it only on mobile devices or laptops which sleep is a recipe for having unsynced local changes. Like you say, you need a desktop machine or a home server as your “cloud.”

I’m tempting to get the early bird pricing on the native sync and have in-app versioning.

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#7

For those who do not want use to any cloud service and want to do everything offline, I have used FolderSync in my android phone and FTP server FileZilla in my Windows PC to sync my vaults between PC and mobile. It works well.

#8

Ahh me too. If only I could check if their sync does only what it is advertised to do. :confused:

BTW it’s best for that home server ‘cloud’ to not have Obsidian running, since Obsidian locks files and then they are not synced until the program is closed.

#9

How does it handle versioning?

#10

BTW it’s best for that home server ‘cloud’ to not have Obsidian running, since Obsidian locks files and then they are not synced until the program is closed.

Oh in that case you can have Syncthing running and syncing the files without obsidian on the machine at all. It would just store the files.

Then version those with git and you’re gtg

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#11

Yep. Syncthing also does versioning, one can use that too (if you wanna keep everything offline).

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#12

I have no idea how git works :see_no_evil: so not sure how to answer you :sweat_smile:
I have not seen any file conflicts so far.

#13

Is the price for the official Sync service offered here per vault or for any number of our own vaults ?

Also, are there any vault size limitations for the sync ?

#14

I think you get 5 vaults, each limited to 4 GB (including old versions of files), but I can’t find where I saw that info. It should be on the page you linked to or one linked from it, but I don’t see it (I also check Help and the pricing page). It might be on one of the pages after you start the buying process? It should definitely be easier to find.

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#15

I think this is the page you are referring to: Obsidian Sync

cc: @praveen6

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#16

Yes! Thank you! I looked at that page, and even the FAQ section, but apparently my eyes had worn out by the time I got that far down.

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#17

Eleanor, thank you for this comprehensive post!

Is there a way to see how much of Obsidian Sync storage have been used? Feels kind of nervous having a limit of 10 Gb and not seeing how much is left.

#18

It should be pretty straightforward to get a sense of it by using your operating system to tell you how much space the vault is taking up on disc, but if you need something more granular maybe file a feature request.

#19

a) True
b) A FR seems like a good idea. For those using a lot of space, an indication of how close they are to approaching the limit could be reassuring.

#20

Just wanted to write down an issue I faced and how I solved it in case anyone in the future experiences the same.

I’m using iCloud sync between my macOS and iOS devices and even though it was working fine at first, somewhere along the line iCloud started having trouble with syncing Obsidian folder and files. I’m not really sure what caused it (maybe uninstalling and reinstalling on my phone caused some weird bug) but everything on iCloud was syncing without a problem except Obsidian folder.

If you ever have an issue like this, the solution is updating your Obsidian installer on your desktop. I tried all kinds of troubleshooting for iCloud without any luck but downloading latest Obsidian installer from the website and updating the Obsidian and the installer solved all the issues and now sync works instantaneously.