I moved my vaults into Google Drive last week If I remember correctly so still monitoring it but so far all seems fine. Im on Windows using Google Back up & Sync
Others had complained that Google Drive could be problematic with Obsidian - apparently due to either the way it syncs (no block syncing like Dropbox and OneDrive) or encryption?
Your feedback is useful, as I’ve been considering moving my storage and backup to Google Drive, given the ability to use the storage across all their services.
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Certainly don’t want to start a conspiracy theory thing and sure Google is not looking over our shoulders when we create files in “the cloud” but they could if they wanted too.
Same goes for every “Drive” system in the clouds. Certainly don’t want to bash on Google alone here (and I don’t want to bash at all to be clear).
Cloud Storage is better than Roam whatsoever 
- Than again Obsidian is the best so that’s normal (LOL)
Cloud storage for me is a blessing. It frees me of backups and other stuff I used to do years ago to be sure my stuff was safe and I could recover whenever I wanted. I’ll take the risk of peaking eyes with that…
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I hear you on the issue of security and it is something I have to consider quite seriously. The risk being to sync and back up Obsidian vaults and files there is a trade off. If there is a data breach at Google or a rogue employee it adds a layer of uncertainty. In balance the risk is low but is still a risk. I have been looking at encryption programs that work inside Google Drive and found a few including boxcryptor I wonder if it will interfere with things in a negative way though?
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I randomly wish to state that I really love your remote working podcast. I have it on Spotify and find it enriching, I also find your voice and tone to be pleasant and soothing (haha I realise that may sound a little…creepy!) - good work, thank you
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That’s very kind of you @KaneDodgson. Glad you enjoy it and find it helpful!
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@RikD: Google stuff IS fantastic, and there is a lot of it, THAT is what attracts some many people to their stuff, and THAT is why “Google knows more about you than your mother”, as the saying goes.
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Having a place to capture my daily notes and build my knowledge base over time is what I’m after. For that, $15 a month is not a problem. I am paying Roam now, I will continue to pay them as long as I have to.
Having said that, I’d much rather pay Obsidian. Having control and stewardship over my own data is a powerful value proposition. I’d pay more than $15 a month for that.
What is holding me back right now is Obsidian’s insistence on distinguishing edit mode from preview mode. I’m writing notes here, not writing code. I don’t want to deal with editing modes. Give me a canvas that I can write on, and get out of the way. And I say this as a professional software developer- it’s not a lack of understanding on my part, it’s a unwillingness to take on unneeded cognitive overhead.
So I’ll wait and watch, eagerly, until I can make the jump. Obsidian devs- you’ve got a new customer willing to jump on board, as soon as you change the mental model of your product from technical, modal editing to a canvas on which your customer can capture their thoughts.
If it’s ready tomorrow, I’ll pay tomorrow.
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@dburkes: out of curiosity, how do you expect to write text in a markdown app without having to bother with formatting, linking, making tables, etc.? Even in a WYSIWYG set-up, where there is perhaps less of “coding” there is still some, a lot even, depending on what you do.
I am sure plain text (.txt) files is not what you have in mind. So, what alternative do you have in mind?
Note: I am not a computer geek, know nothing about coding, just a bit about markdown syntax, and even that to a minimum. I am not asking the question to bug you, I am genuinely interested.
@klass great point, I should have been more clear. I think the Roam approach to having the current line be in edit mode, with the rest of the doc in preview mode, is a great middle ground.
I know it’s on the roadmap now, and that’s exciting, but I’m impatient 
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Doesn’t that mean that when you’re editing the current line you still have to type markdown code/syntax?
Yes, and I’m fine with that. I’m not allergic to Markdown, but unless I want to edit it, why would I want to see it?
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I think this is a very valid point and it is the main thing I miss from Roam.
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OK, clear. WYSIWYG is on the way, I saw a remark by Licat once that said before the end of the year, i.e. 2020.
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Oh…be still my heart! If that ‘option’ is feasible, I’m all in with it. Thanks folks for expanding on the subject. That’s what I love about this Community. Folks seem to have a better tolerance for all levels of user experience and don’t just fly off the handle at perceived slights contained in comments.
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Another App that might implement a different angle (right now even extend Obsidian feature-wise) is Mweb:
- It’s available on all Apple platforms
- You can resize pictures with simple commands
- You can insert real page breaks using the HTML equivalent (
<div style="page-break-after: always;"></div>)
You can access the document via the files app and open it in Mweb. I found this very easy handle and am currently using it as a pre-export app, even on the Mac. Check it out!
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Markdown prettifier from the 3rd party plugins is your friend, then, imitating the Roam feature with just a few glitches.
@RikD, I started out using Onedrive for Obsidian but found that it is desperately trying to keep up with the modifications, leading to excessive load on the Mac over time. This might be different for Windows, on the Mac I made good experience with iCloud so far.
Strange my 100K+ articles research vault is on Onedrive. Took a while to upload (normal -> I re-niced some processes to make it faster), after that everything went fine.
Since the relocation of some files outside the vault the sync reappears less often. I don’t really see any performance degradation or overly active Onedrive…
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So I am writing this post to engage in dialogue - as is suggested by the OP. If you have seen me on Twitter, you know I am a genuine person willing to listen to critique and engage in dialogue (@Calhistorian). So I am writing this really long post, as a form of intellectual engagement. I concede with many of your points below - particularly in regards to security/privacy.
For full disclosure I am a full-tim Roam user and part-time Obsidian user. I use Obsidian for privacy specific notes and for Obsidian Publish (as I am building a hyper-text textbook for my classes). Feel free to engage if you like. Ignore if you don’t. 
Price is steep, but I get the ROI. My read on the “cult” item, is that only people who have a problem with the word itself are turned off. The community is AMAZING!
Yep, I am in the same position.
This is why I use it. I teach with my iPad Pro and Pencil on a digital whiteboard.
Same. Hate chrome. Though I have made an exception. Though all the Chromium options work really well too.
I too am an academic, and this is huge for me.
It is standard and comparable to Notion, etc. E2EE would be nice, but I just don’t put “secret” stuff in there. I don’t have much though. There is an offline only version, but still only lives in browser (dangerous for stability in my view).
I am still waiting for someone to point me at this. Other than the founder who is quite abrasive.
Technically I am “dual-national.” My primary is Roam, but I use Obsidian for Obsidian Publish and super secret stuff.
So perhaps this post wasn’t for me to dialogue with. But as I said above, the price is worth it since I am a knowledge worker.
Happy to converse about Roam or Obsidian. I wrote some thoughts as to why I remain in Roam here:
I was this way too, but I backup to plain text which can frankly be imported into Obsidian. Which I demonstrated here: 
Totally agree, but no lockin really with Roam - perhaps for the less technically minded, which is basically me. But everything is in plain text - though it acts like a database on the server.
I do miss this from my DEVONthink days.
I only link to DEVONthink for my images and files for this very reason.
As I said. But do you know all the CEOs you use and “who” they are. And to be clear, there is no leader to the cult 
.
Them fightn’ words. None offense taken.
This is imporving dramatically by the day.
That ridiculous
Who are these idiots?
So true. Though haven’t been bothered yet by it.
It has definitely done so for me, but that is just the nature of my knowledge-work.
It is a shame, but that is the way it goes with cloud services. This is why i keep my student records in DEVONthink with local sync.
If I could get the same ROI, I would do so.
I patiently await the virtual barrage. I suppose I would love to talk about the most extreme use-cases of obsidian and how an extreme Roam user could replicate. I have 9000+ notes, extreme transclusion and data density/linkages.
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I think when people talk about lock-in in Roam they refer to how usable those files are outside of roam. I only used roam very briefly sometime in June (…could be, pandemic time is weird?). To this day I keep finding files that I need to clean up with block-references or custom-syntax or worst case delete, because they’re unusable (I don’t know where those links lead!). They are fewer each day, but they show up here and there.
Would be great if you could help out some folks with some answers to this: How to import Roam backup into Obsidian while preserving block-level references/links?. I wasn’t around when those “high-fidelity” exports were created, but based on the threads I’ve found here they are meant to be re-imported into roam as backups, not really to be used by other apps.
Edit: Changed the link to the original question. The request to the plugin is here: Import Roam backups in JSON or EDN format, so that block-level links/references are preserved
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