Luke M

Syncthing pairs well with Obsidian

2025-05-06

I love Obsidian, and have been using it to take developer notes and work notes for years. I love the fact that I own the files, which means that I can easily move onto another tool if there are ever issues with Obsidian.

One problem with Obsidian, is that the user needs to bring their own sync and backup tool. Syncing is hugely important even for my work notes; for me the ability to view and edit my work journal and project notes on my phone has been a huge timesaver, especially during meetings.

I use an iPhone and Mac laptop as my personal devices, and have in the past only worked on Mac laptops. So up until recently, just putting my Obsidian vaults in iCloud Drive worked wonderfully. I almost never noticed any sync issues, and the files were available at all times. But recently, I got a job where I was issued a Linux computer instead of a Mac. Because iCloud Drive only runs on MacOS and iOS, I needed to find a new way to sync my vaults.

So, like any software engineer, I reached for Git. It's a wonderful tool for versioning and syncing parts of text files.

iOS, hoever, is not an open platform- I would need to find an app that would let me sync the files that exist within the Obsidian sandboxed directory. Thankfully, there are two options that work on iOS; the first is a Git application like Working Copy, and the second is the Git community plugin for Obsidian. Both can work.

However with both, I noticed that they were silently failing. The consequence was that I ended up losing the data when I installed a new Linux distribution. This goes to show that the absence of errors does not mean there are no problems.

It was of course a dumb mistake. I should have known better. But I don't like when tools hide problems from me. How disapointing.

Syncthing

For a long time, using Syncthing had not been an option. On iOS, the only implementation of SyncThing was a particular third-party app with a poor design and frustrating bugs.

Around the time I was looking for a new method of syncthing, the iOS application SyncTrain was released. It is very good, and I have a great appreciation for the developer for releasing it for free.

With some fiddling, I was able to set up sync for my vaults. As I mentioned before, the Obsidian app can only access vaults that are within its sandboxed directory. Which means that SyncTrain needs to be set up to sync that directory.

Here are the steps;

  1. Create a local Obsidian vault in iOS
  2. In SyncTrain, add a folder, and under location select "Select existing folder..."
  3. Navigate to the "On my iPhone" then the local Obsidian vault, and open the folder.

Please note that at the time of writing, there is a frustrating UI bug where the option keeps flipping back to "Create new folder...". If you keep trying really quickly, you should be able to make it stick to "Select existing folder...".

This has been the best option so far. It has worked seamlessly, although it requires that I open the SyncTrain app on occasion to start the sync.