Remotely Sync

Remotely Sync is a fork of Remotely Save, the unofficial sync plugin for Obsidian. At the time of forking the Remotely Save plugin was not actively maintained and some security improvements were made to Remotely Save - please see the list of security updates made to Remotely Save. Note this plugin is not backwards compatible with Remotely Save, save your data locally and have a backup before using this plugin. See migration guide instructions.

Note that some of the features will be merged into Remotely Save over time, and Remotely Sync is likely less stable at any point in time. If you want stability go with Remotely Save!

If you like it or find it useful, please consider give it a star on Github.

Pull requests greatly appreciated! Please see Contributing to get started.

Disclaimer

• This is NOT the official sync service provided by Obsidian.

!!!Caution!!!

ALWAYS, ALWAYS, backup your vault before using this plugin.

Security Updates from Remotely Save

• Updated encryption to use AES-GCM which is more secure and authenticates the ciphertext when decrypting, making it harder to exploit padding oracle attacks.
• Updated salt from 8 -> 16 bytes. See note
• Updated IV to not be derived from the user's password (discussion)
• No security guarantees, but these are the issues I identified when reviewing the end-to-end encryption as implemented in remotely-save.

Features

• Supports:
  • Amazon S3 or S3-compatible
  • Dropbox
  • OneDrive for personal
  • Webdav
  • Here shows more connectable (or not-connectable) services in details. Need another service added? Please open a feature request!
• Obsidian Mobile supported. Vaults can be synced across mobile and desktop devices with the cloud service as the "broker".
• End-to-end encryption supported. Files are encrypted using AES-256 GCM before being sent to the cloud if user specifies a password.
• Scheduled auto sync supported. You can also manually trigger the sync using sidebar ribbon, or using the command from the command palette (or even bind the hot key combination to the command then press the hot key combination).
• Sync on Save
• Sync status bar
• Syncing bookmarks by default (and other obsidian configuration files if enabled)
• Minimal Intrusive.
• Fully open source under Apache-2.0 License.
• Sync Algorithm open for discussion.

Limitations

• To support syncing deleted files, extra metadata will also be uploaded. See Minimal Intrusive.
  • No conflict resolution. No content-diff-and-patch algorithm. All files and folders are compared using their local and remote "last modified time" and those with later "last modified time" win.
• Cloud services cost you money. Always be aware of the costs and pricing. Specifically, all the operations, including but not limited to downloading, uploading, listing all files, calling any api, storage sizes, may or may not cost you money.
• Some limitations from the browser environment. More technical details are in the doc.
• You should protect your data.json file. The file contains sensitive information.
  • It's strongly advised NOT to share your data.json file to anyone.
  • It's usually NOT a good idea to check the file into version control. By default, the plugin tries to create a .gitignore file inside the plugin directory if it doesn't exist, for ignoring data.json in the git version control. If you know exactly what it means and want to remove the setting, please modify the .gitignore file or set it to be empty.

Migrating from Remotely Save

The easiest way to migrate from Remotely Save (or other forks) to Remotely Sync is:

1. Make a local, unencrypted backup of your files (make sure to synchronize all changes across your devices)
2. Disable the remotely-save plugin
3. Enable remotely-sync and set a new encryption password
4. Delete the encrypted files in your cloud provider (or make a new S3 bucket in this case)
5. Perform a sync using remotely-sync

Credit

• Thanks to @fyears for the original Remotely Save plugin
• Thanks to @sampurkiszb for sync on save
• Thanks to @zaiziw for Obsidian bookmark sync
• Thanks to @FEI352 & @lyiton for helping translate the plugin
• Thanks to @kadisonm for major code contributions (including lightweight sync), refactoring, & bug fixes
• Thanks to @vpsone for status bar UI fix!

Questions, Suggestions, Or Bugs

You are greatly welcome to ask questions, post any suggestions, or report any bugs! Pull requests also greatly appreciated. The project is mainly maintained on GitHub:

• Questions: GitHub repo Discussions
• Suggestions: also in GitHub repo Discussions
• Bugs: GitHub repo Issues (NOT Discussion)

Download and Install

• Option #1: Search in the official "community plugin list", or visit this: https://obsidian.md/plugins?id=remotely-sync (which should redirect you into Obsidian app), then install the plugin.
• Option #2: You can also use Obsidian42 - BRAT to install this plugin. Input sboesen/remotely-sync in the configuration of BRAT.
• Option #3: Manually download assets (main.js, manifest.json, styles.css) from the latest release.

Contributing

Please see our GitHub project for a prioritized list of issues.

General priorities (may change): P0: Top priority, sync broken or risk of data loss for all remote providers. P1: Issue or major feature gap for all providers, usually has workaround P2: Sync issue for some providers but not all, or for some users but not all P3: Nice to have, or cosmetic issue. Does not impact sync.

Building the project:

git clone https://github.com/sboesen/remotely-sync
cd remotely-sync
npm install

Running development build (watches for changes and recompiles)

npm run dev2

Building a production build

npm run build2

Testing:

cp main.js styles.css manifest.json /your/path/to/vault/.obsidian/plugins/remotely-sync

Open development tools and Cmd+r or Ctrl+r to refresh the Obsidian app, quickly reloading the plugin.

Usage

S3

• Prepare your S3 (-compatible) service information: endpoint, region, access key id, secret access key, bucket name. The bucket should be empty and solely for syncing a vault.
• About CORS:
  • If you are using Obsidian desktop >= 0.13.25 or mobile >= 1.1.1, you can skip this CORS part.
  • If you are using Obsidian desktop < 0.13.25 or mobile < 1.1.1, you need to configure (enable) CORS for requests from app://obsidian.md and capacitor://localhost and http://localhost, and add at least ETag into exposed headers. Full example is here. It's unfortunately required, because the plugin sends requests from a browser-like envirement. And those addresses are tested and found on desktop and ios and android.
• Download and enable this plugin.
• Enter your information to the settings of this plugin.
• If you want to enable end-to-end encryption, also set a password in settings. If you do not specify a password, the files and folders are synced in plain, original content to the cloud.
• Click the new "circle arrow" icon on the ribbon (the left sidebar), every time you want to sync your vault between local and remote. (Or, you could configure auto sync in the settings panel (See next chapter).) While syncing, the icon becomes "two half-circle arrows". Besides clicking the icon on the sidebar ribbon, you can also activate the corresponding command in the command palette.
• Be patient while syncing. Especially in the first-time sync.

Dropbox

• This plugin is NOT an official Dropbox product. The plugin just uses Dropbox's public API.
• After the authorization, the plugin can read your name and email (which cannot be unselected on Dropbox api), and read and write files in your Dropbox's /Apps/remotely-sync folder.
• If you decide to authorize this plugin to connect to Dropbox, please go to plugin's settings, and choose Dropbox then follow the instructions. More with screenshot is here.
• Password-based end-to-end encryption is also supported. But please be aware that the vault name itself is not encrypted.

OneDrive for personal

• This plugin is NOT an official Microsoft / OneDrive product. The plugin just uses Microsoft's OneDrive's public API.
• This plugin only works for "OneDrive for personal", and not works for "OneDrive for Business" (yet). See #11 to further details.
• After the authorization, the plugin can read your name and email, and read and write files in your OneDrive's /Apps/remotely-sync folder.
• If you decide to authorize this plugin to connect to OneDrive, please go to plugin's settings, and choose OneDrive then follow the instructions.
• Password-based end-to-end encryption is also supported. But please be aware that the vault name itself is not encrypted.
• Syncing empty files is not supported (see related issue)

webdav

• About CORS:
  • If you are using Obsidian desktop >= 0.13.25 or iOS >= 1.1.1, you can skip this CORS part.
  • If you are using Obsidian desktop < 0.13.25 or iOS < 1.1.1 or any Android version:
  • The webdav server has to be enabled CORS for requests from app://obsidian.md and capacitor://localhost and http://localhost, AND all webdav HTTP methods, AND all webdav headers. These are required, because Obsidian mobile works like a browser and mobile plugins are limited by CORS policies unless under a upgraded Obsidian version.
  • Popular software NextCloud, OwnCloud, rclone serve webdav do NOT enable CORS by default. If you are using any of them, you should evaluate the risk, and find a way to enable CORS, before using this plugin, or use a upgraded Obsidian version.
    • Unofficial workaround: NextCloud users can evaluate the risk by themselves, and if decide to accept the risk, they can install WebAppPassword app, and add app://obsidian.md, capacitor://localhost, http://localhost to Allowed origins
    • Unofficial workaround: OwnCloud users can evaluate the risk by themselves, and if decide to accept the risk, they can download .tar.gz of WebAppPassword above and manually install and configure it on their instances.
  • The plugin is tested successfully under python package wsgidav (version 4.0). See this issue for some details.
• Your data would be synced to a ${vaultName} sub folder on your webdav server.
• Password-based end-to-end encryption is also supported. But please be aware that the vault name itself is not encrypted.

Alibaba Cloud OSS and Minio

• Use the S3 configuration
• Enable "Disable S3 metadata sync" if you get 403 or 400 errors. This means not syncing modification time until it is fixed.

Scheduled Auto Sync

• You can configure auto syncing every N minutes in settings.
• In auto sync mode, if any error occurs, the plugin would fail silently.
• Auto sync only works when Obsidian is being opened. It's technically impossible to auto sync while Obsidian is in background, because the plugin just works in the browser environment provided by Obsidian.

How To Deal With Hidden Files Or Folders

By default, all files or folder starting with . (dot) or _ (underscore) are treated as hidden files, and would NOT be synced. It's useful if you have some files just staying locally. But this strategy also means that themes / other plugins / settings of this plugin would neither be synced.

You can change the settings to allow syncing _ files or folders, as well as .obsidian special config folder (but not any other . files or folders).

How To Debug

See here for more details.

Troubleshooting

password_not_matched

If you get a password_not_matched error while syncing, try:

1. making a backup of your vault
2. removing the vault folder on your remote sync service
3. syncing again.

Bonus: Import And Export Not-Oauth2 Plugin Settings By QR Code

See here for more details.