Obsidian Sync’s Purge process currently only purges out old attachments. When dealing with large .json or .markdown files - such as the case for Excalidraw - the purge process does not fulfill the expected goal of removing items from the remote vault to make space.
Proposed solution
Have Purge also purge the oldest versions of notes and possibly plugin settings as well.
For how far back, maybe half the duration of the “plan” version history allowance. So 2 weeks for Standard Plans, and 6 months for Plus plans.
Current workaround (optional)
The only way around this is to delete the remote vault and start over anew, which also removes all of the version history.
Yes, I second this! I don’t have a desktop OS – I use a tablet and a phone – and I have no option to manage or purge my version history, so my Sync subscription has exceeded its storage limits within a couple of weeks of use purely due to versioning (my vault is only a few MB total, only plain text files), with no way to fix it except to delete the vault entirely. Adding this to Purge would be very helpful, and setting it to half the plan version storage allowance seems like a great solution.
Strong +1 on this. I’ve got 1GB of local notes consuming 10GB of sync space. I’d love to start reaping older revisions of notes to make space for new ones.
Indeed. Frankly this is ridiculous for a paid product where a vault is only 1GB on disk and almost only text based, but ends up taking up 10GB with edits of several files of 0.5Mb each over 2 weeks - with absolutely no way to undo. Having to delete the Vault from Sync altogether and resync is a foot shooter for Obsidian - because the user will likely decide they don’t actually need Sync at all. For me it is a way to support obsidian - but not at the cost of repeated hair pulling.
They could easily fix it - allow optional shortening of the retention interval, optional increase in spacing between versions to more than about 2 types words, or allowing selective purge of individual files – or even making the existing Purge button actually work.
What is also bad is that there is absolutely no prominent warning at all of Synch errors (including a full space allocation) which leads to a complete mess by the time it is realised. This is an expensive paid product and these things could be fixed very easily I imagine.
Yeahhhh for me this is kind of a critical error. I depend on Obsidian to manage all my school work and a few other personal projects when I have time for them.
There is a glaring issue with 77 MB of files taking up 1+ GB of sync space due to file history.
At this point, if I can’t free up sync space by “re-installing” my vault I’m just gonna cancel my sub and find a new knowledge management software. If this attempt works, I don’t want to waste my time doing it all over again in a few weeks when the note version histories pile up.
To be specific, you don’t need to reinstall your vault, you need to delete the “remote vault” and create a new one.
The problem are not attachments (pdf, images, etc), but extra large markdown files and their sync history, including markdown files which are not really markdown files like excalidraw files.
I could have sworn I had issues previously when deleting the remote vault, creating a new one with the same name, and reconnecting on different devices last time I made one. I’m probably wrong though about what went wrong as I had Obsidian open on the desktop, laptop, and phone.
Yeahhh deleting and creating a new vault worked. The file size is only showing half of the original vault now, but I can work with that. I’m willin to bet that files over the 5 MB limit were left out, but I’m not in a rush to save those.
I wish we could categorize Sync’s issues here–with filling up its whole storage with redundant backup data, and then not being able to purge that data–as a bug. I really like Sync when it works.
Are there currently any plans or related information regarding this? I have tried searching with AI, but I could not find any feature plans or anything on the roadmap concerning this specific part.
I have only been using Obsidian for a week, and my database of 140 MB has already consumed 1 GB of space. While I do not mind paying for more storage, I imagine that even 100 GB would be exhausted within a month or two.
If that happens, I would be forced to create a new remote vault and migrate everything every couple of months. That process is honestly just too painful.
I hit this problem this weekend of 10GB subcription filled by my 1.5GB vault, after just a month of vigorous use. I upgraded to 100GB, but still couldn’t get my vault to sync properly because the database was locked for a long time due to trying purge. I have a lot of large conversations stored in my vault, just one of my root folders has 41MB in 1000 notes. A few times having a script edit the tags, or updating the front matter, could eat up a gigabyte!
Looks like I will probably hit this problem again soon, since I am writing a lot of scripts to make updates to my notes.
Despite doing the purge, one of my daily frequently edited notes has as many as 143 revisions stored for a single day!!! That is for a date two weeks ago! That is utterly useless!
This having to recreate the vault would be painful since I have several phones and laptops synced to my vault. This means all of them will have to be reconnected to the new vault too?
This problem is profitable and makes money for the Obsidian developers because probably many users hit this problem, and then naively upgrade to a larger storage plan. Pretty sure this problem is just lurking to bite me again very soon.
There needs to be immediately a function that allows a user to delete all but a once daily history, for all days prior to n days ago. Or even a function to delete all revisions. This should work on a note or a folder level.
It is utterly useless to have 143 separate versions for this note for a day that is two weeks ago. Evernote doesnt have this problem, the same very actively edited note in Evernote has a very reasonable version history.
There also needs to be better reporting on a folder level how much space is eaten up by these revisions for any desired folder. At leas a report of all the folders off of root.
BTW, if the fix is deleting the remote vault and recreating it, wouldnt all my other machines hooked to the vault then have to do a complete resync, meaning dragging a lot of data across mobile connections to phones and such?
And this fix to the problem loses me all of my revisions everywhere in my vault!
Maybe the solution is a switch to just disable revisions entirely that are more than one day old. I can just rely on my own backups of my local copies of my notes to keep the revisions that I want to have.
Its really unfortunate to see this problem has been a sore point for users for years!
So is snapshots in file recovery different than revision history? Snapshots is limited to 7 days, but the revision history stretches back half a dozen revisions a minute for weeks!
Yes, they’re 2 different features. File Recovery works for everyone and is local-only. Sync’s version history of course only works for Sync users and saves changes that have been synced.
I have a huge discrepancy between my local vault and Obsidian Sync: my local vault is ~500 MB, while Sync is using ~6 GB.
As I understand it, Sync has 12 months history. The problem is that users have no way to manually remove this old data or control what is retained.
6 GB of Sync storage for a 500 MB vault seems excessive, and there should be a way for users to manage it.
Proposed solution: add cleanup controls
Could Obsidian add a way to permanently delete old/deleted/useless files from Sync, or give users some control over Sync storage cleanup?
I think a file history duration control would be nice, at least for the 10GB plan. Right now the sync plans are unusable for long-form writing. A 5MB vault with a few 20-30 pages long files is taking the 1GB of the standard plan very fast, and even the 10GB of the bigger plan, because of the longer version history. For the moment, iCloud Drive sync is the best option for long md files.
Adding a concrete real-world data point to support this request.
My vault is 185 MB on disk, but Obsidian Sync reports 993 MB / 1 GB used — nearly at the limit. The vault is almost entirely markdown notes (a knowledge base actively maintained with an AI assistant, so notes get edited frequently — sometimes several times a day), not large attachments.
Clicking Purge did not reduce the reported usage at all. As far as I can tell, Purge currently only clears version history for attachments, not for notes/markdown files — so for a vault like mine, where the bloat comes almost entirely from note edit history, Purge is effectively a no-op.
Right now the only options are: pay for more storage, or manually delete/recreate the vault in Sync to reset history — neither of which addresses the actual cause (version history retention with no user-facing way to trim it for notes).
Would really appreciate either:
Extending Purge to also cover note version history, or
A configurable retention window (e.g., “keep only last N versions” or “keep versions for N days”) that applies to all file types, not just attachments.
