WebDAV Sync is another unofficial syncing plugin for Obsidian, like Remotely Save and LiveSync.
The official Obsidian Sync service is excellent. Meanwhile, there are some users who are less willing to use it due to personal preferences, network restrictions, or economic incapabilities. This plugin is not to replace Obsidian Sync, but to provide another choice for those people.
GitHub repo:
Why another syncing plugin?
While there are already many solutions in the community, (from a personal experience) none of them can satisfy my needs (no discrimination, all based on fact):
Remotely Save: supports a lot of vendors, but is currently unmaintained and buggy (like deleted files come back, you can search for the issue with the same name in GitHub)
Git Integration: ideal for technical users, too heavy for daily syncing
Syncthing Integration: excellent P2P solution, but requires one of your devices to be always online
LiveSync: most robust, but requires a personal server.
I also found Nutstore Sync, which is an excellent syncing plugin but is designed for Nutstore only. Then I thought: why don’t we make it general-purpose? So I forked it, extensively overhauled it for no vendor lock-in, performance, and stability.
How to install?
This plugin has been submitted to the Obsidian release repo to be reviewed and included in the plugin registry. This process could take months. Before it’s done, you can install the plugin via the BRAT plugin:
Go to Community plugins and search for BRAT
Install and enable it
Go to BRAT settings, click Add beta plugin, copy and paste https://github.com/hesprs/obsidian-webdav-sync into the Repository field
Select the latest version and click Add plugin
Enable the plugin, configure your WebDAV service, and then it’s done.
Final words
Although this plugin is robust enough when I’m using it. It’s better to back up your vault before usage to prevent accidental data loss.
If you find my work useful, please give me a GitHub star ! If you have additional questions, welcome to comment below!
How do I setup my username and password? I have no idea what I should add under credential, always a id+secret pair is requested, but my webdav server only wants username + password, AFAIK…?
When configuring Credential, it might be confusing that it requires an ID+secret pair. Actually, this is the new Keychain feature of Obsidian. When adding a new secret, the ID it requested is like a name to a person, whose only purpose it to help Obsidian distinguish secrets and represent them without using the secret directly.
So to add a secret and use it in the Credential field, you can type anything you like to the ID field (for example, webdav-token), and input your true password into the Secret field. Click save and link the new secret to the plugin.
Hi community, I have a long-term plan to support S3 and S3-compatible storage, like what Remotely Save does. Currently, the plugin code is strongly reusable to adapt S3.
I need a polling to determine whether the plan is worthwhile. I recommend everyone who sees this participate in the 5-second anonymous polling to allow me to obtain a fair result, no matter you feel interested about S3 or not, thanks !
Pros of adapting S3:
you can use your S3 service for syncing
S3 will be conceivably faster and reliable than WebDAV
existing syncing logic will be reused, you will get similar plugin experience
Cons of adapting S3:
more development effort and potential bugs
slightly more overhead: S3 is useless for WebDAV users and vise versa, including both backends increases loading time
Note that apart from WebDAV and S3, all proprietary protocols and vendor-specific APIs (OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox) will not be planned in the near future. They add net overhead to the plugin and only benefit a small portion of users.
I’m using / planning to use S3 service, and I’m glad to see the S3 support
I don’t know / am not using S3, WebDAV alone already satisfies my needs
! If you have additional questions, welcome to comment below!
!