How To Implement Multi Way Data Sync in Obsidian

I love making notes in Obsidian. It’s truly a Local-First Application. I love that it is free and doesn’t keep your content hostage. However, I many multiple Macs and keeping them in sync was becoming an issue. I didn’t wanted to use DropBox or Google Drive and thought why not just automated it myself with some line of code.

We only need few tools to implement:

• crontab
• shell script
• a private github repo (any git repo where you can push works)

Create an empty private repo on Github and copy the SSH URl. Not initialize the local repo with git if it’s not already done.

git init git remote add origin git@github.com:<username>/repo.git

Create a new file called as auto_commit_push.sh in your home directory.

The idea is to execute this script in frequent intervals using crontab.

This is how the script looks like:

# Set repository path - replace with your actual path #REPO_PATH="/Users/vinitkumar/Documents/knowledge-base" # add path to your own repo REPO_PATH="" cd "$REPO_PATH" || exit git pull origin HEAD git push origin HEAD git add . git commit -m "Auto commit and push on $(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')" git push origin HEAD

Here is how the crontab looks like, add it by executing this:

crontab -e

*/1 * * * * /bin/bash ~/auto_commit_push.sh >> ~/auto_commit_push.log 2>&1

IMPORTANT: None of this will work, if you don’t give full disk access to cron.

For this go to settings on Mac, and give full disk access by opening the settings, and add press cmd + shift + g and use /usr/sbin and then add cron to the full disk access.

Once done, you can also do the same in the other Mac and enjoy a free sync that just works, in secure.

Also, you might want to disable signing commits like this.

Go to the notes directory and disable signing commits just for this repo.

[commit] gpgsign = false

Also, add .obsidian to .gitignore so that you don’t get merge conflicts between multiple machines. All we care about notes files, and not the Obsidian configurations.

.obsidian/*

I am sure it could be done, but was just not worth the time.

However, if you can afford, I would suggest to buy a paid obsidian subscription for sync as it is a genuinely great software.