I have iOS, and use MacBook/Linux.
EDIT: Wow! It’s impressive how many different ways there are to achieve this. I tried obsidian git, but couldn’t get it to work as expected. Remotely Save is working perfect! Obsidian flew under my radar all these days because I thought sync was the only way. I’m looking into plugins and there’s literally a thousand plugins. It’s kinda overwhelming tbh. I’ll make another post for plug-in recommendations and workflow setup advice. Thank you all!
If you don’t want to pay then just use syncthing. It’s free and cross platform.
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If you only use iOS and a Mac then iCloud will work fine. It’s only a problem on Windows where the iCloud implementation is buggy.
I am all Apple so I use iCloud. Works like a charm. No issues at all
Wanted to add to this, this method still works like a charm even with a windows pc. Haven’t had any issues with syncing across my iPhone, mac, and windows pc since I started doing this.
Do you do much editing on your Windows machine? I tried using iCloud sync but found that the documents would randomly undo a sentence or two as I typed. Also had problems with Windows sometimes not uploading whole files.
Not much to be honest. I mainly use my pc for video games and to write down quick notes if needed
I had the file duplication bug a lot whenever I tried using iCloud on windows.
I purchased sync. I agree it is a little on the expensive side.
The one thing you can do is just use git and turn on the push and pull. It seems to be very reliable this way. Though you won’t be able to use it on the phone as far as I have been able to figure out.
The obsidian-git plugin works on Android
For varying definitions of “works”. It’s incredibly frustrating if you’re using it across multiple devices. Any time I let the repo get more than a couple days behind, I wind up with nasty merge conflicts and it doesn’t handle those. At all. It just sort of breaks.
So caveat emptor.
I pay for sync but also use git. I hate how obsidian works in mobile so I just use GitHub.com’s web interface to take notes on mobile and push to obsidian on save. Obsidian sync then syncs all my devices
If I didn’t have a work Windows machine, I’d still be using iCloud to sync.
There is an education and non-profit discount that knocks 40% off Obsidian Sync, if you happen to qualify.
I had mine backing up to a GitHub repository. I ended up abandoning it and just taking notes in a text editor. Gonna try org mode in vim with a plugin and see if I like that better. Main complaint is that I have 200k commits from obsidian
I currently use Syncthing and it works with the exception of syncing to my iPad (and I imagine iPhone but I have an Android)… need to figure out something else for that. I did see someone somewhere mention CouchDB combined with https://github.com/vrtmrz/obsidian-livesync so I might try that and see if it works.
I see there’s a variety of options. To add one more option: I use the extension Self-hosted live sync : it’s very nice and easy to handle (though you have to be technically interested to set it up)
Self hosted live sync is killer. Amazing extension better then most commercial note sync systems.
With rclone you can use any cloud (or just sync directly via WiFi when at home) to store your vaults
You can use “Remotely Save” community plugin.
@nieceandtows I’m in the Apple ecosystem so I’ve been using iCloud for the same reason of the cost. My vault is relatively small and simple though. I’m assuming that once it starts to get larger and more complex I’m going to have to buck up for Sync.
@clearnew @nieceandtows @obsidianmd In addition to sync, Obsidian sync provides file version history including ability to see what changed.
@dgreenbhm @nieceandtows @obsidianmd I did not know that. Versioning would have come in handy for me today as my hotdog thumbs deleted some characters from a link in a document today on my phone. Luckily, it was a highlight from Readwise so I deleted the document and reimported. So there’s an example of why the cost of #obsidian_sync is worth it.
I use Remotely Save with my Vault, synced to a local NAS that I connect to via WebDAV (but you can use sources like OneDrive, S3, etc.). Apart from some minor conflicts like deleted folders reappearing, it’s pretty stable.
I did a roll-your-own solution with private GitHub repo and a script to push changes and pull them from other machines. I update things on my main desktop, my laptop, and my Android phone this way, no extra costs incurred.
I use git as it even has a native interface; you only need to init the vault as a repo yourself. Then you can host that repository wherever you want, be it your own VPS, your local server, your local computer, a Git hosting service (e.g. github, gitea).
So to speak, what you get by Obsidian sync for your money is not having to deal with the hassle on hosting it yourself.
So I tried setting up obsidian-git, but couldn’t get it to work. I did it on mobile. I did a git init repository, and it said it did. Then I created a branch, and it said it did. I tried pushing it to github, it said no remotes defined. I then defined remotes using the command, and it said success. However, I still can’t see it in the list of remotes, or see the branches, or set remote branch to push to. I gave up and used Remotely Save. Did I miss a step?
What’s the output from
git remote -v?
