Obsidian: Syncing Your Thinking with Syncthing

Fast, Secure, Private, Free

The original article can be viewed on my website.

Motivation

Obsidian loses a lot of power if you can’t take notes from anywhere at anytime on any device you are using. Obsidian offers a paid, subscription-based synchronization service called Obsidian Sync, about which I’ve seen no complaints.

But there is an awesome free, open source project called Syncthing, which is ideal for Obsidian. It’s easy to install on any OS or device, with almost instantaneous synchronization, and it’s 100% private.

Device-to-Device Sync

Most people are familiar with synchronization approaches which involve a central server, or at least a central, usually cloud-based, directory. This approach is commonly used to keep both multiple people and potentially multiple directories, and even development environments, synchronized.

In Obsidian, we don’t need anything so fancy. If you aren’t sharing (collaborating) on your vault, and if you don’t use two devices simultaneously 😉, the device-to-device synchronization is what you need. It is rapid, secure and private. Your information never sits anywhere other than on your own devices.