Context
Now that I’m getting into the swing of using Obsidian, and realizing how powerful the tool can be for organizing my busy meetings at work, I wanted to start using Obsidian in my work day. But without allowing my employer-issued MacBook to have full access to my iCloud drive. I’d originally set up my vault to sync to iCloud to make it easy (and free) to sync to my mobile devices, which are also all Apple devices.
Obsidian Sync
While Obsidian isn’t Open Source, its small but mighty team has earned a reputation for “doing the right thing” time after time. They’ve earned a lot of credibility with their users, and I wanted to make sure I was doing my part to help financially encourage continued innovation on this product. One of the best ways most individual users can do this is to purchase a subscription to Obsidian Sync, which really is very cheap. But compounded over many subscribers, it gives the developers a steady income stream.
And it solves my problem about how to sync my Vault to my work computer without sharing my personal iCloud drive.
How I did it
I’m pretty technical so I’m sure I could figure it out on my own. But I did a search to see what others have done, just to make sure I’m not missing any important details. This post from ryanjamurphy is what I based my own migration path on.
I’m going to assume the reader is slightly competent & technical. This won’t be hand-holding.
- Starting from a Mac desktop/laptop
- Close Obsidian app
- Create an
Obsidiandirectory within the base level of my home directory - In
Finder.app, drag my Obsidian vault folder out of iCloud drive and into~/Obsidian/ - Start Obsidian app, opening existing vault folder inside of
~/Obsidian/ - Enable Sync module.
Then from any other devices, I just have to open a vault with the source being “from Sync”.
It worked great. No snags yet.