I really wish that Obsidian Sync had like... 5 megs for free or something. I can't justify paying $8/month for a thing I haven't even started using, and without sync I have a hard time saying "OK let's try this" compared to Joplin or Notion.

There's a bunch of cool looking stuff though

What's your annual salary divided by 2,000 (VERY roughly your hourly rate), and how many months of the service would it buy you as you try it out?

Totally understand if you're not employed, or barely making ends meet, but given the forum I'm going to take a shot in the dark here.

You can use git and it isn't too difficult or unfriendly. But I totally get it. I'm paying for sync and I do love Obsidian, but it feels a bit steep. I do want them to stick around though, so, I just pay for it.

I was in a similar spot. After too much hand wringing I decided to sign up for monthly ($10/month) sync and give it a solid two months. These are important tools that I’m happy to pay for, but they do take some time to evaluate. I figured $20 was a reasonable amount to commit to.

FWIW I ended up going all in on Obsidian and paying yearly, but that outcome was far from a forgone conclusion, even a month in. I went through a full cycle of honeymoon phase, then discovering warts, and then workarounds, etc. It does take time.

I come from different perspective: I would love to pay $15 per month if it gives me sync with my private storage and work on ios.

Luckily for both of us there is a solution https://github.com/vrtmrz/obsidian-livesync

Works well on ios.

I just store my vault in an iCloud Drive folder and it syncs across all my MacOS / IOS devices. I find it pretty quick to sync live as well. No added cost assuming you have enough iCloud storage to cover your vault.

One more cool thing about setting up with iCloud (see other comment) is you can use Apple Shortcuts or other apps to do cool things to the markdown files directly.

It's just a folder of plaintext files, you can do whatever you want with it, including pointing your Dropbox-like service to it.

I also pay for sync because I genuinely love the product (though I pay $5/month early bird pricing), but thanks to their file-first philosophy, I'm not locked in.

Any other sync solution will do the job - it's just text files.

If you just want to support the project, they have the Catalyst once-off payment that gives you beta access and VIP status on their Discord.

I did some quick git scripts with cron on mac, and windows scheduler to automatically sync between locations. Unfortunately the only git sync plugins I found only worked with password based auth on android.

Aside from not being easily accessable by phone, this works and the .obsidian folder shares the environment + plugins ( minus one for open tab/window layout ).

If anyone has a solution to the lack of git android ssh auth problem I'm all ears though.

I've been using syncthing to sync between my desktop, laptop, server, and phone for over a year and it works well.

I use iCloud instead and it works great.

I haven't checked Obsidian in a while, can you explain why you love it so much? I hear it being discussed a lot.

I think it’s the balance of being “just markdown” on one hand - you can literally just point it at a folder and start typing; and the fact that it’s incredibly extendable on the other. The better known plugins like DataView give you really powerful list / sort / search if you want that, but you can also make it look however you want. I’m strangely snobby about my UIs, so being able to take a theme that’s almost right and then tweak the css is a big deal for me.

Finally - it’s just a fast and solid bit of engineering. Rarely / (never, actually?) crashes, shortcuts are really powerful, constantly being updated… all manner of great :-)

I like Obsidian, but this response sounds like you just read the title and not the article.

I recommend reading the article, it was pretty interseting.

I did. I thought the beginning was great but it lost me after a while, hence my comments about “structure but not too much structure”

Org-roam and git!

> A bit of yaml if needed but just a gentle “daily notes = meeting notes” (on my work obsidian) and “daily notes = journal” (on my personal one), a few tags but nothing too rigid or cumbersome.

Can you explain this one? I use it and the daily note thing bugs me since I would rather separate work and personal in the same value, but I did not know I could fix it.

Was thinking the same thing reading this. I use my daily note as the main launchpad for everything I'm writing each day, I add random thoughts in there and link out to separate notes for bigger tasks/ideas/information.

The daily node is so useful because when I look at an old resource I can see from the back links exactly when I had taken notes on it before and go to that daily note to see any additional context of what I was doing that day.

I use Trello for task management and jotting down things to investigate later.