PTPL 156 · Oh, You’re Leaving Obsidian? Don’t Forget Insurance in Your New App

See the pitfalls, avoid the pitfalls, then go have fun

Another “I’ve left Obsidian” article crossed my desk this week. The author is a developer whose files became corrupted, leading to the loss of valuable data. I feel for them! But I can’t help thinking the situation was preventable.

The article in question (behind the Medium paywall) is well written, engaging, and a good lesson in digital hygiene no matter which app you choose as your home base.

What not to do:

• Rely on plugins to the extent that your notes can’t function without them
• Place the only copy of important notes into a system polluted by dubious plugins
• Think you don’t need version control (because you’re not a startup, or for any other reason)

I take no issue with the author’s decision to move to Joplin. It sounds like a good fit for their needs. Once there I sincerely hope they will do the opposite of the list above:

• Make sure that any features of the app they come to rely on could be replicated outside of the app within an hour or so
• Keep backups of their most important data outside of the app’s ecosystem
• Put version control into place (despite what they believe to be their better judgment)

Joplin looks cool, but there seems to be an issue with non-existent background sync. Their in-house cloud syncing solution likely solves this, if you’re willing to pay for it.

Using Obsidian with third party cloud services - it might not be for you

I’m an Obsidian Sync user and my vault lives in Dropbox. This is not a path recommended in the Obsidian docs for people who hate corruption and sync issues! If you don’t understand the ins and outs, don’t do it.

I’ve been treading this potentially treacherous territory for nearly two years with no issues, however, because I’m strict about maintaining one and one only device as my syncing hub. My MacBook Pro is that hub. It’s the source of truth that Obsidian Sync uses to populate vaults on my iPhone and iPad.

The only times things have gone wrong have been when I’ve attempted to interact with a vault on a secondary device by making changes directly via the Dropbox files, outside of Obsidian. This is something I’d dearly like to be able to do but unless my laptop is open with both Obsidian and Dropbox running, it’s a recipe for data loss.

On my laptop I can interact with files in my vault from any app I like. VS Code is my favourite way of making bulk changes to files. On every other device I make sure that any changes take place within Obsidian.

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