Cross platform note/Journaling solution ?

Ramadhir Singh

Ramadhir Singh

Wasseypur
Herald
hello
Does anyone has any experience using Obsidian - https://obsidian.md/

I'm using icloud notes for over a decade and it is exactly the thing i wanted... but some unavoidable reason now i have to include windows11 in my workflow.
Hence trying to find a cross platform solution.
Obsidian is the most common option coming to me... but i am yet to figure out how two instances can be synced. (dont want subscription services of any kind).

Tried editing my notes in web browser.. but its very counter intuitive. first verify and unlock apple account all the time time to be used in edge. And reading is painful & then if edited.. its destroying my formatting when check back in native notes app.

Please suggest a long term solution.
TIA
 
Obsidian is great, have plenty of add-ons. You can be customized as per your taste but don't look deep into this. It is rabbit hole. I would say give it a try to OneNote, it is really powerful and cross platform. It support top tier features top of my head like sync, insert pdf, annotation, pic, comment, nested document etc.
 
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I use notion myself. I have built exactly the structures and automation around them that I need, and it's kinda hard to replace now.

Obsidian is pretty nice, but I haven't bothered to set something up to synchronize my vault across devices. I'd take the hassle if notion loses my trust with my data for some reason.
 
forum.syncthing.net

Discontinuing syncthing-android

Unfortunately I don’t have good news on the state of the android app: I am retiring it. The last release on Github and F-Droid will happen with the December 2024 Syncthing version. Reason is a combination of Google making Play publishing something between hard and impossible and no active...
forum.syncthing.net forum.syncthing.net

Syncthing dev discontinuing android app.
 
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I am a big fan of Obsidian. I would say use Obsidian if you want to ensure cross platform compatibility and to make it future proof. Even if Obsidian stops development, you will still have access to your notes (since its just a folder of markdown files, images, and other files). And on top of that, people are now developing LLM plugins for Obsidian, and LLM tools such as this and this where you can give your markdown files as input and have the AI/LLM answer for you.

As for syncing, I use a mix of OneDrive in Windows, FolderSync Pro in Android, Git, Gitea and NAS.

My Obsidian folder in Windows PC is in OneDrive. Whenever I make a change in Obsidian, Windows OneDrive client syncs it to OneDrive server. Using OneDrive, Obsidian notes can be synced across multiple Windows PCs. Very rarely, OneDrive would show a conflict. When a conflict occurs, OneDrive just creates a copy of the markdown file with a modified name so that I can compare using WinMerge and choose what to keep.

On my Android mobile and tablet, I use FolderSync Pro. FolderSync Pro can be configured for 2 way sync, but I use only one way sync (OneDrive to phone). FolderSync Pro can be configured to sync periodically, I have it set to sync once a day (which is enough for my use cases).

I also have a Gitea server running locally. I use the Git plugin in Obsidian to automatically commit and push to this server when I make changes in notes. This way, I have a history of all my changes in my OneDrive folder as well as in Gitea server.

I also sync the Obsidian folder to a NAS using the Synology NAS client.
 
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DigitalDude said:
You don't make any changes to the notes in your Android mobile?
Click to expand...
So far, I haven't had a need to change notes in mobile. I always add/modify the notes in PC. I use mobile only as a reference, to read the notes to refresh my memory.

DigitalDude said:
How does this work?
Click to expand...
Disclaimer: There may be better apps than FolderSync. It's just that I started using FolderSync Pro years ago, when they were one of the better Android apps. It still works fine, still receives updates, and as far as I can tell, hasn't been sold to another company (like how Nova Launcher was sold). Their website here shows they have a client for MacOS, but not sure about iOS. For Android, they have a free version called FolderSync and a paid version called FolderSync Pro (forgot what the differences where, but since I bought the Pro version, I must have liked the free version).

FolderSync supports multiple cloud providers - Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive as well as FTP, SMB and some others.

For syncing files, it provides 3 options - sync from mobile to server, sync from server to mobile, and two way sync. There is also another option called 'instant sync' where it monitors the mobile folder for changes continuously (I suspect this may use more battery).

Syncing can be configured it to run periodically - lowest is every 5 minutes, highest is every 12 hours, and there is also a custom schedule option. Do note that server to mobile sync takes some time. Since FolderSync is not aware of the changes in server, I believe it compares every file's timestamp in server with mobile to decide which files to download. My notes folder takes about 5 minutes to sync from OneDrive to mobile even when there are no changes .The notes folder is 208 MB in size with 2412 files and 410 folders, excluding the .git folder (FolderSync can be configured to exclude files/folders).

I have FolderSync Pro configured to download the notes folder from OneDrive to a folder in mobile's internal memory (every 6 hours). I then use the Obsidian Android app to open the notes folder as the 'notes vault'. On both PC and mobile, Obsidian just needs to be pointed to a folder that contains the markdown files, and it will list out the files/sub folders in the folder on its navigation pane.

As for why I don't sync from mobile to PC - apart from the above mentioned reason, I was also worried about how good FolderSync is when it comes to syncing to OneDrive. I never tested it till now, so can't comment on it. FolderSync has the following options if a conflict occurs (if both server side and mobile side changes at the same time)- keep server version, keep mobile version, keep the latest version, keep the older version, and skip. If it skips the file sync, it will provide a notification, so we would know what happened.
 
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unni said:
So far, I haven't had a need to change notes in mobile. I always add/modify the notes in PC. I use mobile only as a reference, to read the notes to refresh my memory. [...]
Click to expand...

sounds neat. currently syncthing is doing a good job of syncing my vault between the PC and android mobile. and I take regular encrypted backups to gdrive, dropbox and onedrive. since syncthing development is stopped I will try foldersync when my current setup doesn't work or when I find some time later.
 
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Obsidian is great, been using it for more than a year. On Android, I used AutoSync for 2 way sync. On iOS, I ended up paying for Obsidian Sync since it was cheap anyways.

I've done multiple trips to Logseq and Notion in the past, and they didn't stick. Especially Notion, it's a huge disappointment for note taking and reliability. Another plus for Obsidian is that I use https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/ to convert my "Public" folder to a website - which is my landing page, blog, public archive, etc...
 
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