I use Obsidian as my central note storing system. Here’s how I sync all my files between my phone, laptop and desktop machines. For free.
Intro
First, Obsidian is actually a piece of software worth paying for. I used to simply store a bunch of text files in a folder and edit them with any old random text editor. Obsidian makes this easier. Linking between pages, the tree view, the nice colours… it all makes the job of editing and managing text nicer.
And if it’s nicer, I’m more likely to do it.
But I want to sync my stuff on my servers, and do some slightly more complex things with my files beyond making them visible on different devices.
My Setup
My files live on my NAS and I have two desktop PCs, a laptop and a phone that I want to access those files from.
My NAS runs TrueNAS, but that’s not important. What is important is that my NAS is not available on the Internet. My desktop PCs can just NFS mount the files and work on them directly.
The laptop needs to do some form of Internet based file sync, and so does my (Android) phone.
The Server
Behind the scenes I have a different server (running in Proxmox, hidden behind an nginx reverse proxy) that runs NextCloud. NextCloud is visible to the Internet. That’s my “home”.
The Proxmox host NFS mounts my files, and then the LXC container hosting NextCloud has a mount point pointing to those files. As far as NextCloud thinks, I am just accessing a local drive.
In NextCloud I have the locally bound NFS mount available as a local directory that appears in my NextCloud home directory.
Getting this working was a bit of a fuss, mostly due to file permissions. The trick is to make sure user and group IDs all match up. Including the mutated LXC container ones.
Laptop Sync
This is relatively easy. The NextCloud client does file sync in the exact same way something like Google Drive or OneDrive does. There’s a magic local folder where all the files appear, and reading/writing to them makes the client do the file sync in the background.
Occasionally it gets mixed up and decides it can’t tell which file needs changing, but it works well for the majority of the time.
Phone Sync
This is a bit more involved. The Android NexCloud client doesn’t really seem to do file sync that well, so I’m using the paid-for version of FolderSync.
NextCloud provides a WebDAV service and FolderSync can connect to this. Disable two-way sync, do a full one-way sync first to your phone, then enable file deletion and two-way sync.
Maybe take a backup first. The two way sync is not that clever, there’s a slight risk the sync might go the wrong way if it decides your empty local folder is newer than all the data on your server. Once it’s done a sync things seem to work well.
Problems
It’s not without its problems though, usually when you’re editing a file that gets synchronised, or you work offline and then the sync gets confused.
I have the Obsidian backup plugin running which does a full zip backup every time I open Obsidian. It’s saved me quite a few times, this file sync isn’t perfect but it’s consistent.
If you’re trying it, maybe make a test vault and work in that for a while and see what happens. It’ll be perfectly fine for 99% of the time, and for that 1% you’ll be glad you have functioning backups. It’s not unreliable, but I have learnt several situations where my setup has the potential to lose data. I can figure out how to work around this though.
