Why Obsidian Sync Is Worth the Setup Time
Obsidian has built a loyal following among writers, researchers, and developers who want their notes to stay local, private, and fully under their control. The official Obsidian Sync service offers end-to-end encryption out of the box, meaning your vault contents are encrypted on your device before they ever leave it. That single fact separates it from cloud-based note apps that store readable copies of your data on their servers by default.
Setting up Obsidian Sync correctly takes about fifteen minutes, but there are a few configuration decisions that trip people up – particularly around vault sharing and managing encryption passwords across multiple devices. Getting those steps right from the start saves a lot of headache later, especially when you are adding a second person to a shared vault.
Creating and Enabling a Remote Vault
Start by opening Obsidian and navigating to Settings, then to Sync in the left sidebar. If you have an active Obsidian Sync subscription, you will see a “Remote vaults” section with an option to create a new remote vault. Click “Create new vault” and give it a name – something descriptive enough that you can tell it apart if you eventually manage multiple vaults. At this step, you are also asked whether to enable end-to-end encryption. Turn it on. You will be prompted to set an encryption password. This password is separate from your Obsidian account credentials and is never sent to Obsidian’s servers. Write it down somewhere secure immediately, because Obsidian cannot recover it for you.
Once the remote vault is created, connect your local vault to it by clicking “Connect” next to the vault name. Obsidian will ask which local folder to sync to. Choose an existing vault or let it create a new one. The initial sync pushes your local files up to the remote vault in encrypted form. Depending on vault size, this can take a few seconds or several minutes. A green checkmark in the Sync panel confirms the connection is live.
Before enabling sync on a second device, pause and check the Selective Sync options. Under Settings > Sync, you can choose whether to sync attachments, plugins, themes, and snippets separately from your core notes. For most users, syncing the core vault and plugins together makes sense. Attachments – particularly images and PDFs – can balloon vault size quickly, so if storage is a concern, leave attachments unchecked until you have a clear sense of what you are working with.
Adding Obsidian Sync to a Second Device
On the second device, install Obsidian and log into the same Obsidian account. Go to Settings > Sync, and under “Remote vaults” you will see the vault you created. Click “Connect” and choose either an existing local folder or a new empty one. Obsidian will immediately ask for the encryption password you set during vault creation. Enter it exactly as you wrote it down – the password is case-sensitive. A mismatch here means the device cannot decrypt the vault, and there is no workaround except using the correct password.
Once connected, the second device will begin pulling down the encrypted files and decrypting them locally. If the vault contains a lot of notes or attachments, give the initial sync time to complete before opening or editing files. Editing a note before the sync finishes can create version conflicts that Obsidian flags in the Sync log, which you can view by clicking the sync icon in the bottom-right corner of the app.
Sharing a Vault With Another Person
Vault sharing in Obsidian Sync is available on the higher-tier subscription plan, and the mechanics are straightforward but require coordination. The vault owner goes to obsidian.md, logs into their account, and navigates to the Sync dashboard. From there, you can invite another user by entering their Obsidian account email. They receive an invitation and must accept it before the vault appears in their Sync panel inside the app.
Here is where the encryption password becomes the critical handoff. The invited user must enter the vault’s encryption password when they connect to the shared vault on their device. You need to share that password with them through a secure channel – a password manager’s sharing feature, an encrypted messaging app, or an in-person transfer. Do not send it over standard email or an unencrypted chat. Once they enter the correct password and connect, they have full read and write access to the vault, and changes sync bidirectionally in near real-time.
Managing conflicts in a shared vault is one of the less-discussed aspects of Obsidian Sync. When two people edit the same note at nearly the same time, Obsidian creates a conflict copy rather than silently overwriting one version. These conflict files appear in your vault with a timestamp in the filename, making it easy to spot and manually reconcile the differences. For collaborative work, agreeing on some basic conventions – like not editing the same note simultaneously, or using separate notes for draft work – reduces the frequency of these conflicts significantly. It is not a collaborative editor in the way a shared Google Doc is, and treating it like one will generate a mess of conflict files.
One privacy detail that often gets overlooked: even in a shared vault, Obsidian does not have access to your note contents. The encryption happens on-device, and the remote vault stores only the ciphertext. What Obsidian does retain is metadata – file names, modification timestamps, and vault size. If file naming conventions in your vault carry sensitive information, that is worth factoring into how you structure and name your notes. For most personal and professional use cases, the encryption model is more than adequate, and the setup process is considerably less involved than self-hosting an alternative like Nextcloud on a VPS.
Obsidian Sync caps storage at a set limit depending on your plan tier, and that cap applies to the total size of all remote vaults on your account combined. If you are sharing a vault with heavy attachment use, you can hit that ceiling faster than expected. The Sync dashboard at obsidian.md shows a live breakdown of storage used per vault, so monitoring it periodically prevents an unpleasant surprise where new notes stop syncing because the account is full.
