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Comment by eXpl0it3r | Hacker News Reader

That went faster than expected, awesome to see!

My major issue with the mobile apps is the syncing. On iOS you get to decide between iCloud or Obsidian Sync. On Android you can hack together something with third-party syncing apps and local disk storage. But if you have been using Dropbox or OneDrive for syncing on your PC, you won't be able to (bidirectional) sync your data to your mobile devices (out of the box).

Obsidian Sync is awesome and at $4 per month (early bird lifetime) very tempting, but then with max 4 GB per vault (à 5 vault) including history, you can't exactly compare it with the 1+TB you get on Dropbox and OneDrive, meaning you'll have to cut out pictures, audio files, videos etc.

This leaves me a bit conflicted and forces me to rethink the setup I have right now.

https://help.obsidian.md/Licenses+%26+add-on+services/Obsidi...

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What amazes me (as an Android user) is that mobile Google drive app doesn't do what you'd expect from it: on PC it allows you to keep few folders on different devices in sync, but on Android the app just allows you to browse/open those folders, not keep a full mirror of any folder from your PC locally.

There are some third party apps that kind of do this for you, but shouldn't Google just make their app do what it is supposed to do? Where's the «backup and sync» alternative for Android? That's the only thing I need to use obsidian on mobile and get rid of Keep or any other app, because obsidian on desktop is just perfect for my needs.

I used to use Zim wiki before, and it was almost what I need, but it didn't use markdown, looked uglier, was slower, and there was no mobile app.

I use SyncThing for this. Works perfectly. (But download SyncTrayzor to make using SyncThing easy)

So, bad news for me if I’m using GitHub?

Edit: looking in to https://workingcopyapp.com/ now. an iOS git client.

Did you use some plugin that helped with the committing and pushing?

On Android you could probably somehow do a local checkout, but don't think that will work with iOS due to file system restrictions.

> Did you use some plugin that helped with the committing and pushing?

No, it's just a folder of markdown files that I keep in version control and access through a variety of software, including (usually) Obsidian.

I just found this: https://workingcopyapp.com/

Sounds like you're in luck with Working Copy, as they mention this as being the only (known) application supporting background-sync for specific directories.

https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian/iOS+app#Sync

Confirming: Working Copy is _itself_ amazing, and solves the syncing-obsidian-to-github-on-ios problem.

That sounds very intriguing. How does syncing work in practice, though?

Do you have to remember to manually trigger commits/syncing or can you set it to commit/sync automatically (e.g., after a short period of inactivity)?

I haven't looked into any automation options, but I doubt it. Seems like Working Copy takes a specified folder in the "Files" app and treats it as a git repo (in this case, the Obsidian/YourVaultHere folder). When you launch Working Copy you're basically sitting at a (very nice) git UI, so all the standard git workflows are present.

I'm used to using a variety of editing software and then manually pushing my notes repo, so the lack of automatic syncing doesn't bother me. In fact, I prefer it. I've been burned by auto-syncing before and it makes me nervous.

Working Copy is the way to go on iOS/iPadOS.

I moved my vault from OneDrive to iCloud today, it feels surprisingly good, with ~10s delay between typing something on my iPhone and seeing it on my Windows computer.

Also since I don't use iCloud for anything else base 5GB will be enough for the foreseeable future.

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