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syncing notes across vaults

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Wouter Groeneveld 2024-04-21 20:51:53 +02:00
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---
title: "Syncing Notes Across Multiple Vaults"
date: 2024-04-21T20:01:00+02:00
categories:
- software
tags:
- obsidian
---
My [Personal Knowledge Management](/post/2021/01/digitizing-journals-using-devonthink/) (PKM) system has hit a new wall since I started taking notes on my work laptop in a new Obsidian Vault. How do you sync notes across devices? The [Obsidian Help](https://help.obsidian.md/Getting+started/Sync+your+notes+across+devices) page doesn't beat around the bush: either use _Obsidian Sync_---their proprietary add-on that lets you store and sync your notes on their servers---or, since the notes are just `.md` files anyway, use any sync tool you'd like (e.g. Dropbox, Google Drive, Syncthing, ...).
Well... Yes... But... That's primarily about syncing your _entire_ note directory (called a _vault_ in Obsidian slang), not about selectively syncing _some_ of the notes between vaults. A few possibilities:
- Do I just copy-paste the whole work vault into my personal one in a subdirectory?
- Do I add for instance `sync: true` tags in the front matter to specify which ones are copied over?
- Do I reorganize the work vault to have a `private` folder that is auto-excluded from the sync?
The problem here is that I now have three entry points for my PKM system: my analog journals, my digital perosnal vault, and my digital work-related vault. This wasn't a problem when I worked for the university as I worked on my own laptop and kept PhD-related stuff in a Git repository and administrative information somewhere else. Perhaps this does signify I should copy _almost_ everything over.
Things get worse once you realize the potential for note conflicts. What if I already made an entry on the topic of performance monitoring? There is no way to resolve the conflict, let a lone spot it, unless the names are similar and happen to pop up in the command menu using `CMD+P`. Besides, what if I want to add information to a work-related note through my personal vault? In other words, am I interested in a bidirectional replication system, much like [PouchDB's DB sync options](https://pouchdb.com/guides/replication.html)? Actually, that's pretty easy to achieve using [Syncthing](https://syncthing.net/)!
Another challenge I was rehashing in my head was an _export_ ability for product-related notes that should end up on the company's Confluence wiki. There's an [Obsidian Confluence integration plugin](https://obsidian-confluence.com/) but that only works for Atlassian's cloud-based solution. Besides, once a wiki page has been made, my note is no longer the "master" note. In fact, I'd love to somehow download and cache the whole thing locally, since the wiki is only accessible behind a slow VPN, robbing me of my ability to play music through my Navidrome local-only NAS.
I asked [Ton Zijlstra](https://www.zylstra.org/blog/) on Mastodon whether or not he figured out the sync problem, considering he's a PKM power-user and I was pretty sure he had multiple vaults running. [His answer](https://m.tzyl.eu/@ton/112292473320887367) (and my translation):
> [...] I'd keep them separated. You could sync both vaults by nesting them, or the overlap via Nextcloud. [...] I myself do a bit of syncing with colleagues' vaults, and a bidirectional directory using GitHub for a client to a [ReSpec site](https://respec.org/docs/), and via an external script export from Obsidian to OPML. I also use Obsidian Sync for my smartphone and tablet.
A bit of everything then, interesting! When I poke around in the [Marginala Search result](https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=obsidian+sync&ref=opensearch), I find quite a lot of bloggers using either iCloud or GitHub---using the excellent [obsidian-git plugin](https://github.com/denolehov/obsidian-git) without having to worry about it---as a tool to sync their vault. I wonder why almost no-one objects to having to upload all of their very private notes, which for me is the whole point of using Obsidian instead of something like Evernote. But anyway.
In other note-taking related news, for both laptops I switched to the [Shimmering Obsidian](https://github.com/chrisgrieser/shimmering-obsidian) Alfred Workflow to quickly add TODO items (`oo my-note`) and search for tags or notes (`o my-note` or `ot #tag`). Just add `- [ ] ({date:yyyy-MM-dd}) ` to the "Scratchpad Append Prefix" option and you're all set. I've only scratched the surface of what it can do. My previous Alfred-Obsidian integration plugin split scratchpad notes per day which, if regularly used, created a mess. I now split up manually per month, which takes like two seconds.