After a year of getting frustrated with iCloud syncing, I finally signed up for Obsidian sync. One of the many reasons I signed up was the ability to selectively sync. However, today I observed something that suggests I may have misunderstood how this works. On my desktop, I have Sync PDFs turned on. And my phone, I have it turned off. Obviously, I’m trying to save space on my phone. But that said, I was hoping that any PDFs I added to my vault via my phone would make their way to my desktop vault. My experience today suggests that’s not the case. So my question is, is that intentional or am I doing something wrong? And if it’s intentional, wouldn’t it make sense to at least provide the option to sync one way (e.g., from my iphone upward)?
Things I have tried
I’ve tried turning on PDF sync on both devices and, after restarting both, the PDF finds its way from my phone to my desktop. But if it’s not turned on on my phone, the PDF never arrives on my desktop.
I’ve searched for things like “one way syncing”, “unidirectional dyncing”, “obsidian sync one way”, etc. with no luck.
I suppose you could look at it that way, but then all syncing is essentially a backup, non? So that said, consider the followung use case to understand why I think one way sync is useful:
When I want to add an image to a note, the easiest way is to pull out my phone, snap a picture, and paste it to the pertinent note. I want that image to find its way to my desktop so that I can see it there as well. But I do NOT want to download all the images from my desktop to my phone (b/c I store ALL my files within my vault). I also use Obsidian on my iPad and have similar concerns there. So what I want is for my desktop copy of Obsidian to have a copy of every file from every device, but I only want the markdown files to be downloaded to my phone and iPad.
Now that I think about it, what would be even better is if there were an option to only sync the attachments that I’ve linked to from a note. That would leave all the “unlinked” bank statements on my desktop, but download the PDFs with cute kid drawings to my phone.