How I synchronize and backup my Obsidian Notes

Discover effective methods to synchronize and backup your Obsidian notes. This comprehensive guide covers using Syncthing, Google Drive, GitHub, Backblaze, and local backups to ensure your notes are s

Synchronizing Obsidian notes across devices, and backing everything up locally and to the cloud. Image generated using AI

Obsidian is my go-to tool for organizing thoughts, capturing and connecting ideas, and maintaining a robust Knowledge Management system. To me, Obsidian has many benefits that are hard to compete with. I don't intend to switch to another tool anytime soon. Is is central to my Personal Knowledge Management Process. That's why I want to ensure that I can access my notes from anywhere, that they are safe, and that I can recover them if needed.

In this article, I will describe how I synchronize my notes across devices and how I back them up. My approach is overkill, but it gives me a lot of confidence about the safety of my system. I hope you will find some inspiration and motivation to do something similar.

The tools I use to synchronize and backup my notes

My notes are really valuable to me. I rely a lot on them, and never want to lose those. That's why I'm taking synchronization and backup very seriously.

At this time, I use a combination of the following to synchronize and backup those:

• Syncthing: Synchronize files across devices

• Google Drive: Cloud storage, available from anywhere

• Git + GitHub: Cloud code hosting with free private repositories

• Backblaze: Cloud backups

• NAS: Local network backups

• Local Backup plugin for Obsidian: Local backups

Syncing is not a backup

First of all, a warning. I will describe two approaches I combine. One consists in synchronizing my notes. The other is backup up my notes. It's important to realize that synchronizing notes across devices is not a backup solution. If you delete a note on one device, it will be deleted on all devices. If you corrupt a note on one device, it will be corrupted on all devices. That's why it's important to have a real backup strategy in place.

Those WILL fail. Mistakes will replicate everywhere, and if you rely only on synchronization, then you're doomed to lose your data.

Where my notes are backed up

I currently have many backups of my notes. This is overkill, but it gives me peace of mind. Here is where my notes are currently backed up:

• Locally on my PC using the Local Backup plugin for Obsidian

• In a private Git repository on GitHub

• On multiple disks of my home NAS (Synology DS1812+)

• On Backblaze

• On Google Drive

Thus, I have local backups, network backups, and cloud backups. I can recover my notes from anywhere, at any time. Each backup has clear timestamps, and I can recover the whole thing or past versions of any file.

In addition, even though I don't consider those as backups, I also have working copies of my notes in different places:

• My PC

• My Laptop

• My Android phone

• My NAS (two copies on different disks, one synchronized with Google Drive, and another through Syncthing)

• Google Drive

Last but not least, many of my notes are also shared publicly on my blog, and on my Website using Obsidian Publish. I can actually recover those easily using this python script.

How I synchronize my Obsidian notes