As someone who also prefers selfhosting, and uses obsidian for work purposes. Having a self hosted version of sync that I could run in our office servers would be HUGE. It’s great that everything is end to end encrypted but there is still the peace of mind that there is a physical drive that has the data somewhere, especially if I don’t want to access my note sync when I’m on a more public facing connection, say at a conference or a hotel. Would much rather force employees to need to be on VPN to access the feature.
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Here you go: GitHub - vrtmrz/obsidian-livesync
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Hi.
using Obsidian is a good tool for using in professional environments. However, this implies dealing with company guidelines; this means often not everything can be shared to a cloud provider. Additionally, many of us are users and not developers or sys ops. I can’t operate a couch DB, maintain syncthing for 5 people or abuse a GIT installation for syncing purposes, I just want to work. Having a simple on-premise version of Obsidian sync would enable many pofessional usecases.
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There isn’t much of an issue with trust because the notes are end-to-end encrypted. That is, the notes are stored on server encrypted and you have the key.
As long as Obsidian is not open source and has reproducible builds that is not really helping as it comes down to a matter of trust in the devs doing their jobs correctly with no possibility to verify the encryption, no?
We use the following solution at work because we are not allowed to use random third party syncs (no offense) either:
- Vault on Sharepoint
- Every user keeps a local copy of the vault folder on Sharepoint as “always available” via OneDrive
- Manual conflict resolution for notes
- Conflicts that arise for vault-settings are ignored
So this boils down to trusting M$ with the data - which is already the case with other data, so no additional open flank - and using bog-standard tools like OneDrive and Sharepoint. It’s a rather ugly solution, especially because there are lots of conflicting copies for settings and data in the .obsidian folder but it still works fine. For the very unusual case where two users edit the same file at the same time, we do manual resolution of the conflicting versions.
With few users (<10) this works, but it can not scale and you can not do collaborative note-taking as in OneNote. But for the moment this is fine. 
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Trust doesn’t always have anything to do with facts like end-to-end encryption. Some organizations (e.g., banks and government agencies) strictly prohibit data leaving the network regardless of whether it’s encrypted or not.
Because there is no certification process for community plugins, my organization has prohibited them. So for myself and my colleagues, at least, I still vote for this to be implemented as a built-in feature without relying on a community plugin.
You can verify the E2EE yourself:
That makes sense. I assume it would still have to be paid, because Sync is one of Obsidian’s main revenue streams and even a self-hosted version would have to be maintained and supported, but that shouldn’t be an issue since the scenario you describe applies mostly to enterprises.
Since nearly all plugins are open-source, your organization could verify the source code if it wished to, but I understand that they may not be willing to do so, especially if it’s not an IT company.
Came here to add my +1 for a self hosted sync option that would run alongside the commercial sync offering. I can’t afford $96USD a year on top of VPS hosting I already pay for.
Use case or problem
We do have very strict policies which include to have no cloud storage in use for any kind of data. So we cannot use iCloud, OneDrive or Obsidian Sync to host and share data.
Proposed solution
Is there any chance to get an Obsidian Sync service hosted in our own datacenters which enables us to use Obsidian Sync as if we would use your cloud sync storage ?
Current workaround (optional)
We are evaluating nextcloud/owncloud to enable us getting obsidian data synced/backuped, but this is workaround is frustrating due to missing “share with my team” functionality, buggy sync for configurations and configuration files/folders
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I understand your concerns about privacy and keeping your data offline! It’s frustrating that Syncthing can’t sync with iOS due to the sandboxing restrictions. A feature in Sync that allows for private synchronization between Obsidian devices sounds like a great idea—just pointing to a server’s IP for syncing would make things much easier and more secure.
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