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Comment by rockooooo | Hacker News Reader

I've tried obsidian so many times and want to love it but the sync situation - either the expensive official one, the approved options for mixed iOS/Windows clients (icloud) and third party tools like obsidain-livesync - were all way too issue-prone for me to ever trust it. I hope they figure this out

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I recommend using syncthing. It's very easy to self host but I actually use a SaaS for it: syncding.com. It gets me 100gb to 1tb of disk in which I can create folders and keep them synced with my 2 laptops, my phone, my server etc... I have an Obsidian vault with Meld Encrypt to encrypt some files, a keepassxc file I share across my devices and my todo.txt

It's simple to setup and will work forever instead of paying for different providers that might shut down or increase their prices.

I should probably mention — I’m one of the co-founders of https://www.syncding.com

I originally built it for my own setup (multiple devices, encrypted files, etc.), and it kind of grew from there.

Not everyone has a NAS at home, so the idea behind syncding.com was to provide a simple, encrypted online Syncthing hub that just works without the usual setup — with built-in ZFS snapshots for versioning and recovery.

Always cool to see others using similar workflows.

Haha now your comment might make it seem like I was trying to advertise for you, hence the downvotes.

As a disclaimer, no I wasn't paid and have never been contacted before by Syncding, just a happy customer.

At $4 per month, I don’t consider it expensive at all to have this whole category of problem solved for me. Mobile app, desktop, laptop synced flawlessly and quickly.

A lot of people view that as pretty costly for what is incredibly small amounts of data in the scope of things. for half that cost you can get 100gb of storage through google and have it synchronize all my docs AND my pictures and videos and anything else I want, so by comparison $4 can seem like a lot for note synchronization.

The main value proposition of Obsidian Sync isn't storage. Obsidian is primarily used with text files which are tiny. My 20 year old collection of notes is only about 1GB for 19,000 files and a few images/pdfs.

I'm biased but I'd say the benefits over Google Drive are: 1. end-to-end encryption, 2. seamless integration with the app (e.g. version history), 3. granular control over what settings and files are synced for each device, 4. shared vaults.

In addition Obsidian Sync helps keep Obsidian 100% user-supported. Obsidian is not subsidized by advertising or any investors. And you can actually contact the team if you need help. See also: https://stephango.com/vcware

Yes even for me in Spain 4$ is not bad. But for me I just want to sync with my local servers. I don't want any stuff in someone else's computer even if it is end to end. So I use the livesync plugin.

I'd pay for the option to host my own server with the official sync but they don't offer that for now.

This might not work for everyone who reads this, but I put all my Obsidian files on my iCloud drive. Since they're just markdown, they sync up on all my (Apple) devices and I can see the notes on my Macbook, iPad and iPhone at any time. I'm already paying for iCloud storage anyway for other stuff so it's very cost effective for me. (Obviously this wouldn't work if you're not in the walled garden of Apple)

I know it's probably no help on iOS, but for people on android or no mobile requirement, just push and pull to a git repo. You can probably even set up a cron or something to sync regularly.

What setup are you using to push and pull on Android?

GitSync works for me both on Android and iOS. I'm not using it that frequently tho, and you have make it a habit to open GitSync first, sync the changes (pull) and then open Obsidian. Also, after changing the notes you should again open GitSync and do a sync (commit + push).

https://gitsync.viscouspotenti.al/

I had the same issues, so I built a macOS menu-bar app that does one-click git pull/commit/push for any local folder, including Obsidian vaults. Uses the system git binary, fast-forward merges only (stops on conflict instead of silently merging), blocks secrets before push.

I personally just use git, there's even a plugin that automates pushing and pulling changes. Does that not cover your use case?

I just use github and have a nightly cron job to sync the vault repo

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