Needing a way to sort dates into a calendar

Help
1

What I’m trying to do

Hi All
I am fairly new to Obsidian and am using it to organise my family history information. I am not trying to create a family tree- have got that sorted elsewhere. I have created myself something of a template for to fill in information about each person and use tags and links to relate them together (not interchangeably)- in family history circles, it’s something like a Family Group Sheet, only more detailed for how I want to use it. Also I create files for information on things like locations, articles I’ve found, family stories etc. All the little bits I’d previously saved as separate snippets in separate documents over time. What I am stuck on is that I want to coordinate dates which appear on my Group Sheet template/note on a calendar. I can find a lot of calendar plugins that track tasks, but I want to use a calendar more like a birthday tracker of sorts, essentially like having a calendar on the wall in your kitchen with all the family dates on it, where I can place dates of birth, death, marriage and other significant dates like baptisms or burials and be able to see all that happened on each day. Or find all dates in a particular year or year range, or see clusters of events around certain dates. Not all date entries are complete- some only have a year, some an approximate year, some a year and month. Elsewhere in my filing an incomplete date would read Abt1960, or 1970-00-00 (As Year-Month-Day format) where I don’t have months or days. Another thought would be if I can use something like a tag that I can have collate information to in a single note, rather than typing them in individually.

Things I have tried

Currently typing events into a single page calendar with tables of days of the months. Which is fiddly and double handling. I thought about using tags for each date, but that’s going to be a LOT of tags and I think while it would work, I’d rather save using tags for more meaningful data than potentially 1000+ individual dates. I’m trying to get my head around YAML, but still unsure as to whether I can sort things the way I want.Fully willing to accept that it just may not work the way I’d like, and given that Obsidian has organised and solved 90% of my data hoarding problem, I’ll just have to deal with it if that’s the case.Really appreciate any thoughts.

2

Your instinct is right. It is worth explaining why, because the damage does not look like a typical sync conflict at first.

Two things are happening at the same time. Google Drive on macOS uses File Provider, so files can be online-only placeholders that download only when accessed. But Obsidian expects a normal directory that it can read and write at any time.

On top of that, you have two independent services syncing the same files without knowing about each other. When they disagree, one resolves the conflict. Then the other sees this as a new change and resolves it again. This ping-pong effect creates duplicated notes and silently reverted edits. You cannot fix this just by tweaking settings.

The only fix that works for me is to stop using one folder for two sync services. You should split the roles:

  • Keep the vault on Obsidian Sync only. This is your main copy. One service, no conflicts.
  • Put a one-way copy on Google Drive. Let your MacBook be the only device that writes to it.

You can do this with a simple command:

rsync -a --delete \
  --exclude '.obsidian/' --exclude '.trash/' --exclude '.git/' \
  ~/Vault/ ~/"Google Drive/My Drive/vault-readonly/"

You can run this from a launchd agent every 15 minutes or so. Nothing else writes to that folder, so there are no conflicts to resolve. You just get a copy that might be a few minutes old, which is perfectly fine for AI tasks.

It is very important to exclude the .obsidian folder, and not just to save space. Plugins keep their settings in .obsidian/plugins//data.json and rewrite them constantly in the background. Note conflicts are visible (you get a conflicted file and fix it easily). But data.json conflicts happen silently. One machine wins, you get no warning, and weeks later your settings are a mess. Claude does not need these files anyway.

The read/write part is harder. If you let Claude write back to that Drive folder, you have two writers again and the same old problems. Instead, give writes their own separate lane. Let Claude create files only in a folder like vault-readonly/_inbox/. Exclude this specific directory from the rsync --delete command. Then, just pull files from it into your actual vault when you are on your Mac. This way, the two sync directions never touch the same files.

One more thing: if this is on a company Google Drive, remember that the folder falls under your employer’s retention and access policies. Keeping a personal vault there is usually a bad idea.