Transcript with Timestamps
00:00
Hey there. Good evening, Adam here. Today I want to show you how to sync your Obsidian across multiple computers using Dropbox. Dropbox is probably the easiest solution, absent a couple of niche situations that I’ll go into at the end. If you’re just doing real basic Obsidian type things with text files, just do this using Dropbox. I’m going to skip to the step where I have already made a Obsidian folder inside my Dropbox, just because I have some client folders I can’t really show inside my primary Dropbox folder. Inside of Obsidian or inside Dropbox, you’re just going to right click, and then you’re going to make a new folder I named Obsidian, and then you’re going to have an empty folder here, and this is where you’re going to create your new vault. To do that, you’re going to go into the command prompt, type in Vault, open another vault, and then just hit the Create button.
00:57
You get to navigate to that folder in Dropbox and name it, put it inside of that Dropbox folder, and then hit Create. That’s all there is to it. When you get to your second computer, once it’s all synced, I will say if you’re going to use this across multiple computers, I would recommend closing Obsidian on the computer you’re currently not using it on because there’s some possibility of some weird desync issues. If it’s trying to save or save over the top of it, you can create some issues with Dropbox because Dropbox does not have the best version control. So just keep that in mind. Make sure to close it on your other computer. If you’re going to use it on your laptop as opposed to your desktop, et cetera, I would close it on your other computers while you’re not using it. Once you get to your second computer or wherever you’re going to do it from, open your command palette again and then hit again.
02:00
Just type in Vault, open Vault, and you’re just going to open it from where it’s at, select the folder, and then you’re going to hit select folder. I’m going to hit Cancel so it doesn’t screw it up, and that’ll open it up and then you’ll be good to go. The only real downside of Dropbox, I will say, is if you have very poor Internet, sometimes it can either be slow to open or actually just fail to open your text files. Even worse is if you have slow Internet and you’re using a bunch of attachments such as video or audio attachments inside of your vault. PDFs are okay because they tend to be pretty small. My recommendation would be to force your Dropbox. You can actually force your Dropbox, right click it, and you can go in. Well, actually, you can’t do it from here anymore, but go into your Dropbox options and force this particular folder to remain synced at all times, so it doesn’t have any selected sync issues.
03:08
If you do that, it’ll be less likely to have some lag. The only way it’s going to lag a bit or crash on occasion is if you’ve just updated or just added something to the folder and it hasn’t synced correctly, if you quickly switch another device. If you keep it permanently synced at all times, then you shouldn’t run to that issue basically ever. That is my only caveat, is if you’re working with a lot of video files, a lot of audio files, dropbox is not the fastest upload download. So perhaps a different approach may better. Or better yet, just don’t put a bunch of videos and audio inside of Obsidian. It’s not really designed for that. It’s really not designed for attachments at all. But photos and PDFs are fine. I wouldn’t really attach anything that has any real size to it. All right, well, I hope that was helpful.
04:01
If you have any questions, let me know. And I hope this answers your questions. Thanks. Bye.