I’ve been using Obsidian for more than a year (and paying for sync). There are still 2 things I don’t understand about it and which I find frustrating.
The first is:
Where are my files?
I often drag files into Obsidian, this create links. I never thought much about it, but recently I’ve been taking my iPad to some meetings and finding that my files are not there! I.e., I drag a Word doc into Obsidian on my (Linux) laptop, it creates a link, I click it, it opens the file (in LibreOffice). I always assumed the file was somewhere in my vault (and I was determined to find out at some point where that was). Now I open de note on my iPad and tap the link and it create an empty note with the name of my file, totally unexpected. Now I worry, where are all the files I dragged into my notes over the last year?
Second:
I still don’t understand plugins, where do the live?
I set up the community plug in Iconic, which makes it very nice to navigate my notes by customer, they al have a custom colorful icon now.
Again, I open Obsidian on my iPad, no icons! Ok, perhaps my add-ons are not synced? So I try to enable the addon, but that doesn’t work. So I have no icons on my iPad. I feel like I have spend a lot of time setting up the perfect Obsidian, paying for sync and now only some things sync? I don’t understand what is happening. I expect sync to sync the whole experience, but that is not the case apparently? Is there a way to set sync to just sync everything?
Am I doing something wrong? Am I misunderstanding what Obsidian (sync) is meant to do? Is there a sync solution that just sync everything? I’m willing to pay for it.
Now that I am finally using Obsidian across a lot of devices I really worry where all my stuff suddenly went, I though it was "in Obsidian” synced by my paid subscription. I was wrong?
READ NR 2 FIRST the link looks liks [[Database hints.docx]], the lack of a path to me hints to a local file line, as in, in the same folder as the md file container the link. The fact that the file is NOT in that folder but does open successfully suggests to me there is some hidden layer of information contained in the link? If so, where is it? Where is the file? How can it open by clicking the link?
Ahhhhhh !CLICK! It says “In the folder specified below“: That is where my attachements live. I never know this, yet I probably did at some point set this up myself because it is a very bespoke location. I will now change it to “Same folder as current file“ which should indeed give me my expected behaviour. Apologies and thank you!
I have 0 folders excluded and everything active. So possibly my iPad cannot run the Iconic extension?
By default, wiki links don’t need paths. The link means “a file with this name, somewhere in the vault.” When you click the link, Obsidian checks its index of all the files in the vault and opens the one with that name. When you make a link, Obsidian only adds a path if multiple files use that name (or if you’ve changed the link setting to require paths).
To sync docx files, Settings > Sync > Sync All Other Types needs to be active on all devices where you want the file.
