Syncing your Obsidian Vault to multiple devices

There are multiple ways you can sync your Obsidian Vault to your devices:

Obsidian Sync – $4/month for `1gb for 1 vault or $8/month for 10GB per vault for up to 10 vaults.
Syncthing – Free
GitHub – Free
OneDrive – 5GB of Storage for free otherwise 1TB of storage with Microsoft 365 Plan
Google Drive/Google One – 15GB of Storage for free otherwise plans starting at $1.99/mo for 100GB and up.
Dropbox – 2GB of Storage for free otherwise plans starting at $9.99/mo for 2TB and up.
iCloud+ – 5GB of Storage for free otherwise plans starting at $0.99/mo for 50GB of Storage and up.

Obsidian has a great help article maintained by the community that goes over how to use iCloud+ and provides brief links for syncing your vault on Android.

Quick Tips

There are a few tips I’d like to share before you learn how to sync. They are frequently asked about in the discord server and subreddit.

A vault is just a folder with files in it.

This is something a lot of people don’t understand. As you can see from the image above, that is my main vault. When I open Obsidian I see this:

I’m using my own Moonstone Theme, if you were wondering.

See how they look very similar? That is because they are. You are viewing folders with markdown files in them. This means you can sync your vault the same way you sync anything else between devices.

iCloud is buggy

There is no way around it. iCloud is buggy on Windows and on iPhones and Macs. Some people are able to use it just fine while others have re-indexing happening (which happens when iCloud offloads files from your Apple devices and causes the app to freeze until it is done) frequently.

iCloud on Windows is known to be buggy and is warned against on the Discord server to the point where there is a bot that mods use to warn people of this:

iCloud on Windows Issues

GitHub works as a sync and backup solution

If you decide to use GitHub for your Digital Garden AND your vault, you will need 2 GitHub Repos.

When you do this, you will be backing up your Digital Garden files twice (once to each Repo) and the rest of your vault once.

Not only are you able to backup your files with GitHub (with the commits and pushes) but when you pull from the repo you are syncing as well. It also provides a visual of all changes that you make each time you sync so you know exactly where the period was added when you last pushed to your Repo without having to guess.

That is the benefit of using GitHub vs other solutions.

Articles

If you want to know how to sync using the other options, you will want to check out the following articles and videos. They go over it better than I could (as I’ve only ever used iCloud and GitHub).