Google Sync

Sync your Obsidian vault to a Google backend you own — your personal Google Drive, or your own Google Cloud Storage bucket — privately, with optional end-to-end encryption and no third-party server.

Why this exists

Your notes are yours. Keeping them backed up and in sync across devices shouldn't mean paying a subscription, routing your vault through someone else's server, or letting a plugin rewrite your files.

Google Sync keeps everything on infrastructure you already own and control:

• Your cloud, no middleman. Your notes and credentials go straight to your own Google Drive or Cloud Storage — never through any relay or shared service.
• Private by design. Optional end-to-end encryption means even a leaked credential or a compromised bucket can't read your notes.
• Never touches your notes. Sync state is tracked out-of-band — the plugin never injects metadata or rewrites your Markdown.
• Safe two-way sync. Changes flow both ways, deletions propagate, and a conflict keeps both copies — it never silently loses data.
• Built for real vaults. Handles large vaults, attachments, and special-character / non-English filenames.

Two ways to connect

• Google Drive — sync to your personal Drive with your ordinary Google account.
• Google Cloud Storage — for those already on Google Cloud. Sync to your own bucket.

Use one, or set up both and choose which is active.

Setup

Requires Obsidian 1.13.0 or newer.

This plugin ships with no OAuth credentials of its own. You create a Google OAuth client once and paste it into settings; it then lives only in this vault's plugin data. That means there is no shared credential bundled into the plugin for anyone to extract, and every release can be rebuilt from source byte for byte — see SECURITY.md.

1. Open Google Cloud Console → Credentials and pick or create a project.
2. If you plan to sync to Drive, enable the Google Drive API for that project.
3. Create credentials → OAuth client ID, application type Desktop app.
4. In Obsidian, open Settings → Google Sync and paste the client ID and client secret under Google OAuth client.
5. Turn on Google Drive and/or Google Cloud Storage, then press Connect.

Sign-in uses the OAuth loopback flow (PKCE) against 127.0.0.1 — your browser opens, you approve, and the token is captured locally. Desktop only.

Upgrading from 0.6.x or earlier? Those versions signed in through a shared OAuth client that was bundled into the plugin. That client has been removed, so an existing sign-in can no longer be refreshed: create your own client as above and press Connect again. Your synced files are not affected.

Privacy & security

Security is the first priority, not an afterthought: credentials are never synced and never logged, permission scopes are kept minimal, and content encryption is available so a backend leak is never a content leak. Details in SECURITY.md.

Status

Beta. Setup and usage documentation is on the way.

License

MIT.