Sync Obsidian using Working Copy and GitHub

Obsidian is a marvellous application for creating notes and organising all of your note taking. It’s available now on the iOS devices and I have it on my iPad and on my iPhone as well as on my Mac. I just love the way I can create a wiki style set of notes really easily using Obsidian. In this video I show you how to use GitHub and the application Working Copy on iOS to synchronise a vault in Obsidian. This is instead of paying nearly €100 for a year of synchronisation from Obsidian. It is so much easier and more convenient to synchronise with the paid for service. If your level of usage of the application isn’t sufficient for you to want to pay then you could have a look at this solution to synchronise using Working Copy and GitHub.

I followed a tutorial provided by Rsteele which I found in the Obsidian forum. When I followed the instructions carefully step-by-step I was able to get a good experience of synchronisation of notes in obsidian on the iPad and iPhone. It’s also possible to use a GitHub client such as Gitkraken or to use the terminal on your Mac.

Another possibility to synchronise your Obsidian applications on the Mac and on iOS is to use iCloud. I found it wasn’t such a good experience because files in the iPhone somehow or other didn’t want to synchronise. With that problem you would likely end up with merge conflicts. So if you was working on the notes in one place and it didn’t merge properly and then started working on the same note in another place you’d have to mess about to get it fixed later. At least by using GitHub you get a version control and if there are any merge conflicts you are able to do a check of the differences and set it to the way you want it.

GitHub is not particularly easy to use as there are a number of commands to learn and to work with. I thought I only needed to commit files and didn’t need to do anything else. I found later is necessary to use the push command to get the documents where they need to be. When you’re working on the iOS devices in the application Working Copy before you start making any changes on the device in Obsidian you should do a Pull command to make sure that there’s nothing been changed anywhere else.

In this video I show you how to set it all up and I tested it by creating files in GitHub when setting it up. I then follow up by creating notes in Obsidian on the iPad. I synchronised those back to GitHub then I pulled the files onto the iPhone using Working Copy. I made changes on the iPhone in Obsidian which again I was able to synchronise back to GitHub ready to be used everywhere else.

I think the problem with this is that it’s all a little bit of manual. You have to remember to push changes from wherever you’ve been working at the end of a working sessi ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akW57xD_EKg