One Way Syncing

Use case or problem

Allow Obsidian to utilize either Obsidian Sync or Obsidian Publish as a one-way cloning mechanism.

Proposed solution

Have another option in the Obisidan menu to open a vault from URL (an Obsidian Publish URL), which will clone the contents and update upon reopening the vault or a click of a button.

Current workaround

Git is an option with the workspace file ignored and a read-only repository.

This was discussed on the Discord:

joethei —
why do you want to do this?

Dylan —
If an obsidian vault composer has their own way of distributing content apart from Sync or Publish to hold large files such as video recordings, "opening vault from URL" would be fantastic to distribute and automatically pull updates from the origin efficiently.

This can be done over HTTP, and since Publish is already delivered over HTTP then this solution would kill two birds with one stone.

Allowing alternative hosting solutions to be involved

But I fear that the business decision to do this would hurt the selling point of Publish if there is a cheaper alternative... Also, the priority is quite low.