Rsync Obsidian Vaults to iCloud

The mobile app for Obsidian for the iPhone can write Vaults to iCloud, but getting vaults from your Mac into iCloud can be tricky. These scripts to seek to address that.

Usage

Prerequisites

• Make sure you've installed Obsidian on your iPhone FIRST, as it needs to set up an Obsidian directory in iCloud
• Seriously, THIS IS MANDATORY. If you have not installed Obsidian on your iPhone, STOP NOW and do that.
• You can verify that Obsidian is on your iPhone because it will create a directory in your iCloud account. Here's how to view the contents of that directory on your Mac:
  • ls -l "Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~md~obsidian/Documents/"

The reason for having Obsidian create the directory is that there is some metadata involved with the directory creation. Therefore, creating the above mentioned directory yourself won't work.

Getting your Vault into iCloud

• Next, run the script as follows: ./rsync-obsidian-to-icloud.sh ./VAULTNAME VAULTNAME_IN_ICLOUD
• The script will run rsync against the local directory that you specify and copy those files to the directory in the Obsidian directory in iCloud
• At the completion of the script, a suggested alias will be printed so that future invocations of the script can be made no matter what directory you're in at the time.

Syncing changes from iCloud to your Vault

• Run the companion script: ./rsync-icloud-to-obsidian.sh VAULTNAME_IN_ICLOUD VAULTNAME
• This will sync down changes from iCloud to your local vault
• Files that you deleted on iCloud will not be deleted from your local vault, to prevent accidental deletions.
• At the completion of the script, a suggested alias will be printed so that future invocations of the script can be made no matter what directory you're in at the time.

Caveats

• Depending on how much data you have, it can take a macroscopic amount of time for files from the iCloud directory on your Mac to sync to your iPhone. You may need to be patient.
• Very large Vaults can crash the Obsidian client. This has been reported to the devs and is being actively looked into.

Testing instructions

• Run create-test-dir.sh to create some test directories in test-src/
• Run a few tests
  • ./rsync-obsidian-to-icloud.sh ./test-src/ /tmp/test - Should succeed
  • ./rsync-obsidian-to-icloud.sh ./test-src/ test/test2 - Should fail due to slash present
  • ./rsync-obsidian-to-icloud.sh ./test-src/ $(pwd)/test-dest - Should sync to ./test-dest/.
  • ./rsync-obsidian-to-icloud.sh ./test-src/ test-dest - Should sync to test-dest in iCloud and be visible via iPhone Obsidian app.

Who built this? / Contact

My name is Douglas Muth, and I am a software engineer in Philadelphia, PA.

There are several ways to get in touch with me:

• Email to doug.muth AT gmail DOT com or dmuth AT dmuth DOT org
• Facebook and Twitter
• LinkedIn

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any comments, suggestions, or bug reports.