Roll your own Obsidian sync

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I recently shifted off of a few other note taking applications to Obsidian after they announced the new mobile applications. I had been looking for a solid editing experience available both on a laptop as well as on my phone and Obsidian has seemed to be like the right tool for the job so far!

However, I wanted to keep all my notes in sync across my devices, Obsidian does offer a paid service to synchronize your notes across platforms but I figure I'd look into rolling my own since that was one of the recommendations in their documentation.

I figured Dropbox would be the ideal platform to synchronize my notes since I'm already paying for a decent amount of storage there. I started looking into it and I couldn't find a reliable way for both the Dropbox android application and the Obsidian android application to reference the same vault directory, until I found Dropsync / Autosync for Dropbox. This app let's you choose a folder on your device to sync with Dropbox and it continues to watch for changes and sync them automatically!

Setup

So, let's dive in to walk through how you can setup a similar syncing!

First things first, you'll want to install the Dropsync app linked above and connect it with your Dropbox account.

Then you'll want to setup a sync folder pair, what this step does as I understand it is create a new folder on your device and also uploads it to Dropbox. When setting this up you'll need to ensure that it also syncs hidden folders, since the .obsidian directory within a vault is synchronized across your devices.

Next you'll want to create a vault if you haven't already, once created (or if you have an existing vault that you want to sync), you'll want to move it on the computer it is on into the synced folder that Dropsync has just setup.