Mobilize Your Literary Universe With Obsidian Sync
In a time when everything is a service (including this website!), it's rare to come across a piece of software that is A) free and B) so valuable that you actually want to pay for it. This year, two apps have met that criteria for me. The first is Diarium, which is a journal app that can use OneDrive as your cloud storage. The other is Obsidian, which I use to store everything I know about the Vinestead Universe, including notes for upcoming books and the full texts of everything published so far. It is an insanely useful local wiki, and I cannot recommend it enough. And best of all, it's free for personal use.
So why pay for it?
Obsidian allows you to put your Vault (the folder where all the wiki files are stored) inside your OneDrive, Dropbox, or whatever cloud-syncing service you use. This makes the Vault accessible on all of your other computers, but not on your phone. This was bothering me, because every time I was on the go, I had to make notes in Google Keep and transfer them over to Obsidian when / if I remembered to do so. There is an Obsidian app for iOS, but it has its own black box filesystem and can't read from OneDrive's.
In all honesty, taking notes in Google Keep and transferring them over isn't that much of a hassle. And since money still doesn't grow on trees, I think I could have been happy never having the sync feature. Except... Obsidian deserves some support. The tool they've given me (for free) to manage my literary universe is invaluable. I don't know what I would go back to if Obsidian ever went away.
The only caveat to signing up for Sync is that you can no longer have your Vault inside OneDrive (or other syncing service folders). That bothers me a little bit, but it's nothing a little backup script won't solve.
There are tons of options for how the sync works, which are useful if you're running on a laptop with smaller storage.
I mostly use text, and you can see from the above that my entire wiki only takes up 7.84 MB of storage. That includes the text of eight novels!
Enabling sync finally gave me a reason to use the Obsidian iOS app, which seems to work pretty well. All I care about is getting to a notes page where I can jot down some ideas, and Obsidian does that really well.
Four bucks a month is a reasonable price for the syncing and cloud storage, but it's also a fair tithing to a company making a great product.
