Obsidian Sync and .obsidian workaround syncing ideas?

santi · January 30, 2021, 3:05pm

I’m super happy with Obsidian Sync so far! and can’t wait for the mobile apps and for .obsidian to sync, right now I need ideas to deal with .obsidian not syncing.

.obsidian

Syncing all my hotkeys, community plugins (and their settings) is really important to my workflow.

I’m aware that Sync will eventually offer a way to sync across the configs from .obsidian but since it currently doesn’t, I’d like to know what are current recommendations for dealing with this.

Dropbox background

previously I used Dropbox to sync accross my laptop and desktop computer.

The best part of Sync so far, is how easy it is to have obsidian in my 2 devices without any conflicts (in dropbox I had conflicted files all the time)

Possible alternatives

Git

I could create a repo through a symlink to only have the .obsidian directory, yet I’m not sure if I should in include the sync.json or if it’s better to git ignore it.

I’m not sure how this would work in the best way so that it works on my 2nd computer correctly, without having to copy every setting manually everytime.

Dropbox

Like I said previously, I used dropbox and it synced .obsidian with few issues.

However when I got sync I removed my vault from dropbox since it might cuase several conflicts by havig a double syncing situation (sync + dropbox)

I could somehow find a way to symlink the .obsidian file into dropbox and then link that to my 2nd computer, but I’m not sure how good of an idea that’d be.

Help and suggestions

I’m sure others who have Sync face this issues, so I’d like to know if there are any other ideas to solve this.

Computer 1

Here I have Obsidian sync activated, and this folder is inside Dropbox which also syncs .obsidian folder

Computer 2

This computer only reads the dropbox folder, which let’s me sync everything included the .obsidian folder. However this one I have Obsidian sync deactivated

Mobile

This one is only synced through Obsidian sync, since syncing Dropbox in Android is a pain and this works great so far.

Ideally using just Obsidian sync would be amazing, I’m not sure if I’m missing something or if there’s a better workflow, so I’m happy to know if there are better ways to do this

y.h · April 13, 2021, 2:37pm

Nice workaround. I will probably use the same for PC (with OneDrive) and use Obsidian Sync for mobile/tablets. For the latter, I also use FolderSync to sync once the config folder to mobile so I don’t have to start the config from scratch.

And I created a feature request as I do think that syncing some aspects of one’s configuration would be useful!

santi · April 13, 2021, 3:05pm

Awesome, yeah I like your feature request, that’d be really useful

rolfaalders · April 13, 2021, 4:22pm

Interesting. But how can you disable sync on 1 machine? Isn’t that setting stored in the .Obsidian folder?

santi · April 14, 2021, 3:19pm

You are actually right. It’s not necessarily a great solution yet, since when I’m in computer 2 I have to manually pause obsidian sync every-time. And only have it running in computer 1.

But you are right Dropbox also syncs the settings in .obsidian

david.lohner · May 7, 2021, 10:40am

I just found a solution which seems to work (on macOS); deeper testing required:

Move .obsidian-folder to desired Cloud Service for syncing.
Create a symbolic link to that folder on both machines
Remove .obsidian-folder from synced vault. on both machines
Move the created symlink into vault folder on both machines

Done. Settings, CSS and Plugins sync via cloud service of your choice (in my case, iCloud Drive). Obsidian uses the .obsidian-symlink for reading these settings. All your notes and files are stored in your vault folder and being synced via obsidian sync.

Of course, this does not work for mobile (iOS).

santi · May 7, 2021, 2:13pm

Hey @david.lohner that’s really interesting. I think you are on to something!

I was just a bit confused by the term you used .obsidian-folder do you mean the folder that contains the obsidian notes (aka the Obsidian vault) or do you mean just the .obsidian folder?

This seems to be a genius idea, if I get a better understanding of it I can test it on Linux to see if it works.

If it’s not too much trouble a couple of screenshots would be amazing to understand the process a bit better

Thanks a lot!

david.lohner · May 7, 2021, 9:11pm

Yep, I meant the .obsidian folder (this hyphen-thing is usual in german…)

I used this macOS Service for creating the symlink easily: GitHub - nickzman/symboliclinker: A contextual menu plugin & service for Mac OS X that allows users to make symbolic links in the Finder

So in my vault, the .obsidian folder is a symlink pointing to another folder on my iCloud drive containing all necessary data for obsidian. Since Obsidian Sync does not sync the .obsidan folder but all other files in my vault, there is no trouble.

I hope this helps.

santi · May 13, 2021, 10:52pm

Hey @david.lohner thank you so much for the epic screenshot. That made it perfectly clear. I think this is a genius idea and I’ll definitely be testing it!

Thanks for sharing this great approach, until Obsidian sync can easily sync the .obsidian folder without issues.

Truly appreciate it!

iiz · May 14, 2021, 9:37am

Very interesting. I think sync.json is identical between PCs in this case. I don’t know well how Obsidian sync works, but doesn’t it matter?

david.lohner · May 17, 2021, 7:40pm

Uh, I may have run into a problem: Obsidian synchronises all settings; so also the name of the respective device via this symlink. For some time now, I’ve noticed that notes are almost always duplicated (i.e. the same content is twice in one note) - which is quite annoying.

I might test disabling this symlink-workaround and go into further testing…

rpcm · May 17, 2021, 8:26pm

It might be nice if sync.json was instead named sync-DEVICE.json, since it is currently device specific. That way the UI could give you the option to ‘import’ settings from another device. The current solution forces you to exclude sync.json if you use other syncing services.

santi · May 18, 2021, 7:12pm

that’s a great idea. the sync.json file tends to have a conflicted copy all the time when used with Dropbox

rpcm · May 18, 2021, 7:22pm

Or conversely, rework the internal data structure of sync.json to segment by device.

lai · May 18, 2021, 11:38pm

Hello guys, how are you? I found this discussion here and I’m wondering if you can help me, since I use some similar solutions, but with some specifics.

I’m using Elementary Os and its native sync system, Vgriver. I put my box directly on my drive, via Vgriver. However, I noticed that some notes are now appearing the way they appear in the image. Accessing the notes through the drive through the browser, I believe they are correct (now I don’t remember what my last edition was on them, but it seems to be ok).

However, I can’t access them through Obsidian. What I am using as an alternative was to access them through a markdown extension available through docs, directly through the browser, while I need to access them. I couldn’t say if the issue is with O Obsidian or if with Vgriver.

[image]

rpcm · May 18, 2021, 11:43pm

That’s a client for Google Drive. Are you also using Obsidian Sync?

lai · May 22, 2021, 3:40pm

I’m not using Obsidian sync, but I save obsidian folders directly in vgriver, which would be the corresponding google desktop drive for elementary os

rpcm · May 22, 2021, 5:02pm

Does VGrive have some kind of ‘download files on demand’ setting? If so, try turning that off.