Open Dropbox directory as vault on iOS

[Wesramm]

First, search the help docs and this forum. Maybe your question has been answered! The debugging steps can help, too. Still stuck? Delete this line and proceed.

What I’m trying to do

Sorry, but I cannot find that this has actually been solved…… I have moved to syncing with Dropbox so that I can be completely standalone with my .md files. However, the iOS app does not appear to allow you to open a vault in an existing folder.?
Does anyone have a workaround? Is this something they are going to address? It would be a shame if I could not use Obsidian on my iPad……
Thanks

Things I have tried

[ariehen]

It’s not possible to use Obsidian with a vault in Dropbox directly.

Meta Post - Syncing between Devices

The official documentation for syncing Obsidian across devices is a great place to start. If you have ideas to improve the Obsidian documentation, pull requests are welcome. You can contribute to the process of documenting Obsidian on GitHub. First things first: Obsidian Sync vs. Third Party Sync. The advantages of Obsidian Sync is that it’s officially supported, “just works,” has nice versioning that is built into Obsidian, and is blazing fast and optimized for your vault. The main tradeoff is…

and (courtesy of @Synchronicity):

These are the five methods currently believed to work for syncing between devices if you’ll be including an iPhone and/or iPad:

• iCloud (NOTE: iCloud on Windows is known to cause file duplication issues as well as data corruption and loss, and the Obsidian devs and community strongly recommend that you avoid this combination.)

• Official Obsidian Sync

• Self-hosted LiveSync plugin

• Remotely Save plugin and various cloud services, including Amazon S3 or S3-compatible, Dropbox, OneDrive for personal, and Webdav

• Git with the Working Copy iOS app

[CarolineMathieson]

This probably isn’t something that obsidian is going to be able to fix I think because the issue is inside IOS itself which doesn’t allow access to most directories outside the app sandbox. This is an app security decision Apple have made. Apple do allow you to access the icloud directory however as that is under their control. The best that can be done is to sync directly with a cloud service from within the app. I would be very nervous about using that as that means i am giving the developer access my account details via the app.

[Synchronicity]

I don’t know how they do it, but you can sign into Dropbox from inside 1Writer (an iOS markdown editor) and use it as if it were local iPhone storage.

[berot3]

I still would love to get a statement from the devs as to why 1writer or Taio and other apps (möbius sync) CAN access others apps folders…. But obsidian not😐

[ariehen]

Full File System Access For The iOS App (Open Existing Vault/Folder)

Again, Obsidian needs direct filesystem-level access to the Vault, not access mediated through iOS’s sandboxing API. The only direct filesystem level access locations on iOS are Obsidian’s Private folder and Obsidian’s iCloud folder.

[CarolineMathieson]

That’s because you are giving your login credentials for your cloud provider to those applications. If you trust those applications to not then forward that information to the developer then go right ahead and provide them. I suspect obsidians developers don’t want to get involved with that. It’s a tricky legal minefield. Remember that this is only an issue with IOS apps. Normal desktop apps don’t have those restrictions. I store all my vaults in dropbox folders and never access them on IOS. This is because I work on Windows, Linux and OSX and that’s the only cloud provider that works well for all three. iCloud is out and Onedrive and Box are too slow to sync.