After reading several topics (that were really general in nature), I am looking for detailed information and an official support statement on whether an Obsidian user can place their Vault in iCloud and use that for synching across home desktops and iOS devices WITHOUT subscribing to Obsidian Sync at roughly $50/year.
Things I have tried
The general guidance articles I have read basically state that you install Obsidian on a iOS device, then use that device to create a NEW vault (never mind that I have 2 years of note taking on my desktop vault that I want to incorporate). So, I was successful in the creation of a new vault in iCloud, then backed up my desktop vault and moved that under the newly created iCloud Vault. However, all sorts of mahem happened when trying to get the iOS devices to sync the migrated vault. Both the iPhone and iPad apps froze multiple times while synching. The process took days to finally complete and when it did, I found that no templates or related automations for note creation worked. The only thing that more or less worked was just viewing a note and adding a new one (on the iOS devices). Back on the desktop, there were some processes that now were completely broken (i.e. I use Day Planner which didn’t even show up, and the Commander which refused to work). Some notes could not be located (yet their relative location within the vault was unchanged). My work more or less is classified as a remote, home-office worker, but I do have occasional need to go into work and change my platform (i.e. I’m typically an Mac user, but may have to work on a Windows PC for the day). Obsidian is a vital part of my organization and PKM, so I need this portability. Perhaps the answer is using the Obsidian Vault outside iCloud, and simple have the central vault on Dropbox or similar offline/accessible storage, then run the Obsidian desktop client either on the Mac or my Windows PC laptop?
Are others having this same sync issue? I’m not terribly averse to setting up and paying for Obsidian sync, but it seems that cloud storage is cloud storage and should be approached that way. I pay for iCloud, to the tune of about $36/ year, why should I invest another $50/year in Obsidian Synch when the underlying technology should be essentially identical? In any case, if others have solved the iOS synch issues, I’d be appreciatvie of any hints or tips
Thank you!
Using iCloud on Windows is known to lead to file duplication and corruption issues. We strongly recommend avoiding this combination for optimal performance.
Setting up a vault iCloud works ok in an Apple-only environment, if you take a few precautions.
Obsidian Sync works well. IMO you don’t pay for the disk space, but for the seamless integration with Obsidian.
Thanks for that and I did visit that topic - I am not a Windows user, though occasionally I could see myself using office-based Windows computing when I periodically go to our corporate office space. But, for instance, theoretically, if the Obsidian Vault is located in the Cloud (whether iCloud, Dropbox or other storage alternative, I can simply have the Obsidian Client running on whatever laptop I want and still access that vault content, right? The key seems to be whether the whole environment is experienced across the platforms. Clearly this is NOT the case on IOS. The iPhone and iPad clients for Obsidian do NOT offer anything but just fundamental note retrieval… extensions don’t work and automation functionality fails, at least as far as I can see. I still need to test further whether that works if I access the common vault via two different clients (ie. windows vs. MacOS).
I’m not quite sure what you’re asking here. If you are using iCloud on Windows you might experience file duplication/corruption issues. Even if you aren’t writing notes, the act of opening tabs, or auto-updating the app, or other interactions will change some of the settings files in your Vault/.obsidian folder, and those files can also end up conflicted.
A few community plugins do not support mobile, but most do.
Can you link to the steps you were following? Without knowing exactly how you set things up, it almost sounds like maybe you have a different path to your vault. If you made a manual vault and then loaded your vault into that folder, you might have a nested vault-in-a-vault.
Example:
/Path/VAULT/
/Path/CustomVault/VAULT/
In this case, you have 2 different vaults. VAULT, and CustomVault. And that might explain why notes can’t be located properly. But you might also be describing sync issues, I can’t really tell.
I’m not particularly trying to address iCloud, but since I am primarily an Apple Mac user, have both iPhone and iPad, I thought maybe that might be what would be expedient to pursue first. Because iCloud DOES have corruption issues, even within its own ecosystem, I’m now kind of looking at storing my Obsidian Vault on Dropbox. When I travel, I take my MacBookPro or my Company-issued Windows Laptop. Both of which SHOULD allow me to have the full Obsidian experience on the Obsidian client on the respective platforms as long as they are connecting to the same Vault (on Dropbox).
My previous issue with iCloud was not on Windows at all. I originally started using Obsidian on my home Mac Desktop with the Vault being stored locally. I would weekly back the vault up to a USB off line storage in case of emergency. The opportunity came up for me to have to access my Obsidian Vault away from my home office, however, and that’s why I first thought of iCloud + iPhone + iPad. Indeed moving the vault to iCloud allowed me to view notes on my iPad, for instance, but the interface wasn’t near the same. It basically just gave me a open slate from which to look at my vault notes and even then, the synching was slow and klunky.
Now, my requirements have changed. If I travel, I’ll just take my MacBookPro that has the Obsidian client loaded and then access the Vault in Dropbox. I’m at least going to try to see how that works over the weekend.