Obsidian Sync: dynamic pooling of available space across remote vaults

Yeah I really hope the vault limitations are removed in the near future :frowning:

You could just nest all eight into another vault called Books and sync that. You wouldn’t ever need to open Books as a vault once you have it set up.

2 Likes

Frankly, the pricing and restrictiveness of the Sync AND Publish features are sort of a joke when you factor in their pricing.

I’m not opposed to supporting the developers. But since this request is specific to Sync I’ll try to keep my thoughts on Sync here.

When paying yearly it’s $4/mo, that’s $48/yr. I only have two vaults: one for work, one for personal. Ideally I’d just have one and I’ll probably move to that eventually. But what I am guessing here is that for MOST users their vaults will primarily be text with a few images here and there to support some of their notes. I’d be surprised if there were many using 4GB of space for a vault. I’m sure there are some, but still… the average user is likely to use far far less.

I’d love to just sync with iCloud, but mobile makes that incredibly cumbersome… it’s almost like it was made to be a crappy experience to sell Sync. Nevermind that when the promotion ends it’s $8/mo when paying yearly. That’s nearly as much as iCloud’s $10/mo for 2TB of space plan.

I bought Sync because it’s convenient, but it was only made more convenient by the developers.

I really hope that when the prices go up there’s very little traction for these services and it forces the developers to rethink the pricing strategy.

2 Likes

I like Sync— it’s critical for me since I am juggling a few devices with restrictive company management profiles (besides the duplicating notes… but hopefully that’ll be worked out). However, I have all my notes in one vault, so I’d really like to at least be able to pool space together. I have a lot of images and diagrams in my notes and I’m getting near enough to the 10 GB limit to be worried. Even at $4 a month, it is expensive for only 10 GB. 50 GB seems more reasonable.

I don’t blame the devs though, they seem extremely helpful and open to enabling routes to alternate sync platforms. Both OneDrive and iCloud worked decently well for me before switching to Sync.

1 Like

I also advocate for the following changes to Sync’s service terms:

  • Pool storage (limit per subscriber, not per vault)
  • No limit on number of vaults per subscriber
  • Option to pay for additional pooled storage

Sync subscriptions are simultaneously payments for a service and expressions of trust in and support for @Silver and @Licat.

But unless Sync’s terms evolve, over time more and more Obsidian users will be forced to seek an alternative provider for the service. :frowning_face:

I use just two vault and it’s mostly note taking so there is no chance i ever go close to the huge storage limit set on the sync service. 5 vaults however can be quickly reached, also i wish the publish subscription could be part of a single package witht he sync service, just one “premium” subscription that gives you online functionalities.

The current pricing however is a real problem for me. Although i subscribed sync for a year I did so thinking in my head “i hope i’ll find an alternative cheaper solution by then”, because the software itself is free, but sync alone made it more expensive than most full cloud alternatives. I know there is git but the ease of use of sync makes it very nice to have. On top of that, if I want publish i would have to add 20$ a month on top of that? For 30$ a month i can have several full cloud products, streaming services and so many other things. I think $4 a month is already quite a lot for the space i use, i can get hundreds of megabytes of cloud storage, and I’d rather support the product through donation, VIP/Insider account like i’m doing right now, feeling like i’m donating and contributing and not feeling like i’m overpaying for just syncing data…

Let’s hope by next year other options and tiers are available, as well as do-it-yourself solutions for people with their own cloud/git/storage ^^

While I am happy to pay for things, I mean, as most in here have, I have donated to support free software.
But I, too, find the pricing of sync and the limitations too much to consider subscribing, I will more likely just donate more.
The initial $4/m IMO was borderline too high.

As for the publish being in the picture, I think comparisons to gitbook, notion, confluence, and wordpress are all completely reasonable. All offering significantly more, for significantly less.

To be honest, I consult to 2 companies, one using Notion.so, the other using Atlassian Confluence, and both offer sync (well, they are cloud) and publish for about $5/month per user.

2 Likes

I am new here and within two days of using publish it appears I’m already at a limit … it said 50 mb’s over … I’m assuming this is as much as I had to publish 4gb. But this is a crazy limitation. Is there any reassurance this will be changed soon? Did I read this wrong? There is no option to purchase more space? Really fretting over what to do next … what changes will I have to make. I do have pictures, but not many videos. The pictures go with 18 years of writing blog entries. Is this program useless to higher use?

Thank you for your thoughts,

Ann

Not sure why the developers chose a vault limit of 5 - this seems like an arbitrary amount. I personally need 7+ different synced vaults and now I’m limited to the point that I am spending time merging vaults that shouldn’t be combined in the first place.

I hope this is changed soon and we start seeing more vaults per account or unlimited vaults.

You could simply nest them purely for the purposes of Sync.

@Silver and @Licat: Would you be willing to comment on this thread (summarized here)?

Of course the authors of these posts would most like to hear that you will adopt the changes to the Sync service’s limits that we’ve outlined.

But if you do not intend to do so, an explanation for that decision would be very much appreciated.

Thank you!

Regarding pooling space, I can answer (after talking with licat) that it’s likely not going to happen because it will complicate the backend infrastructure significantly (and make it more brittle).

You can open two separate feature requests for your other two points (more remote vaults and pay for more storage).

One of the OP’s use cases — “many Vaults [so] I only see the things relevant to that project” — would be solved if we had the ability to set a temporary scope as suggested in "Nested vault" / vault scoping plugin and the threads it links.

Tried doing that this last month. Quickly hit the GB limit and now I’m separating them into their own vaults again. The main issue is each vault has heavy pdfs and imagery…

1 Like

I also have a strong desire to be able to combine the five libraries. Because Obsidian’s advantage lies in the linking between files, the fragmented library actively discards this advantage. At the same time, multiple libraries don’t make sense for a lot of people. So again I suggest being able to add the option to merge the sync library, even if it costs extra. Thanks!

2 Likes

I agree. If the aim is to make some money (as it should be) the pricing is pitched way to high to do that - lower and more flexible pricing would encourage people to use Sync (and make more cash)

Perhaps

1 Vault 10GB $3/m
2 Vaults 20GB overall $5/m

That is the sort of starting point that would make it possible for normal home users.

2 Likes

I think we deserve an explanation

We have said what we can, but are kinda stuck here because pricing is forever the dilemma between customers and providers.
I think what’s needed here is that devs come up with a comprehensive announcement. The announcement should adress the dissatisfiction of users and show what the concerns are for devs. It should also include how Obsidian intends to solve this problem. Otherwise it just feels like users are being ignored.

Hi Alicila,
As I said in my previous reply. Dynamically pooling the available space is hard to implement with the current backend infrastructure and it will also make it more brittle.

Manual allocation of available space is more likely to happen. I created a FR here https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-sync-manual-allocation-of-available-space-among-remote-vaults/44432

There are no plans to work on this in the short term. Should this change, it will be added to the roadmap https://trello.com/b/Psqfqp7I/obsidian-roadmap

This is now possible

2 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.