The current sync logic only allows you to exclude folders from sync. In my case I only want to sync a few folders, but instead of selecting those I have to exclude all the ones I don’t want to sync. And then inevitably I create additional folders or temporary folders that end up synced to mobile devices because I forgot to go back and change the list of excluded folders. This would be very simple if there were an option to only include certain folders instead of only exclude certain folders.
Proposed solution
When setting up sync specify whether the list of selected folders should be included or excluded in sync. If set to included then only those folders are synced. Otherwise the current behavior would be the default.
Current workaround (optional)
You have to always remember when creating a folder to change the sync configuration if you don’t want it synced.
Using Obsidian CLI you can only sync full vaults currently. Frequenly only a sub-folder of the vault should be shared. For example when a vault has “Home” and “Work” folders, only the “Work” folder should be synced to work machines.
This FR is also present in variations for mobile and desktop app, showing additional need.
Proposed solution
add a sync limiting command with parameter. --only-folder
Recursive sync of folder tree from as root.
eg for a folder “Home” in the vault root, command would be:
ob sync --only-folder ‘Home’
The solution should also work with --continuous command, to maintain sync between the local folder and the vault folder.
Current workaround (optional)
Forked obsidianmd:master to briannewbold:obsidian-headless, added the feature. It’s running perfectly as requested.
Closed PR (pull/23), but code layer not exposed so I couldn’t do a proper code line update PR.
Related feature requests (optional)
Consideration for additional use cases:
Syncing of multiple folders from a defined list
Syncing of complete vault except indicated folder/file(s)
anyone else thinks this is useful? we can do away with assuming full-vault sync as the only option; this will make things a lot more flexible and cost-efficient !
I don’t need this feature, and I would never organize my vault like you explained, but I can imagine how this would be useful in some organizational schemes.
For example, I use Backblaze as a backup service. And it backups everything by default, and you have to exclude files. The problem with this is that you have to keep managing things like unwanted app library folders that get added as you install apps.
I would much rather define my important user documents explicitly, rather than implicitly carving away what I need. (This was more of a problem years ago when I was on a very slow rural internet connection.)
I also once worked on a freelance project using sync.com as a tool. It also forces you to exclude folders. So other freelancers were generating GB worth of data that were not relevant to me. New folders would be automatically downloaded to my computer, which began running out of space. Whereas some other sync tools allow you to opt-in to the things you need specifically.
do you recommend any? i’m not at all familiar with setting up any of the 3rd party sync service.
i thought Obsidian Sync is built-in and always reliable, plus it brings a little financial support to the operation of the app, so i was just going to use it. no extra tinkering required and win-win
LucidLink was the tool I used that was opt-in. I was only a user on my client’s account. I wasn’t the admin on the account. This was for a project with huge media files. I never attempted to use this with Obsidian. So I can’t say whether this is relevant to your situation. It looks like the starter plan doesn’t allow per-folder access.
yeah, it’s not. thanks for sharing tho. looks like it’s a collab purposed tool.
how likely do you feel that this FR will be considered by the development team?
This would help me in my on-going struggle to have technical notes that I use at home and at work available on my work computer, but still prevent my private notes containing things like financial account numbers, social security number, copies of love letters to my SO, etc, from being synced to my work laptop.
I currently maintain a complicated multiple-vault system that really isn’t up to the task to sort of accomplish my goal. If I could have folders not sync by default, that would be great.
Another solution would be an encrypted vault that only Obsidian could read, but that would be a larger technical challenge than selective sync.
i totally get that. the most intuitive approach for me is to use only 1 vault for everything in life, as i only have 1 life to manage, and all things inside of it are interconnected.
current Obsidian Sync’s design assumption is “everything to sync”, and hasn’t accounted for that use case where only a section of content in the vault are relevant to sync
With Obsidian Sync, we can choose which folders we want to sync to the device. If we only want to allow 1-2 folders, this means manually typing every other folder to stop them syncing.
For large vaults this becomes tedious. It would be better to have a ‘Sync Only These Folders’ instead.
This is is very high on my wish list for Obsidian. Use case: Large vault on desktop, lean and mean vault on smarphone, only “Mobile” folder gets synched with the smarphone. The current scheme for restricting what is synched to a particular instace of a shared vault is awkward from a user experience perspective.
Obsidian on my desktop functions as a files manager too, in addition to as a notes manager. Very powerful and convenient that way. The thing is just that many of that non-markdown files are either archived, too large, or just never needed on mobile.
Very. But over all this time, I have kind of already got used to maintainig my own seperation on this. LoL.
We can adpate. But this still deserves optimisaiton to acount for such a usecase we have.
Implementation though is outside my ability to comment on.