NAS Vault Sync

Sync your Obsidian vault with your own NAS (or any WebDAV server) — no subscription, no third-party cloud. Works on desktop and mobile.

Built as a personal replacement for paid sync services: your notes travel only between your devices and a server you own.

Features

• Two-way sync over WebDAV (tested against Synology WebDAV Server / Apache mod_dav)
• Mobile support (iOS/Android) — uses Obsidian's requestUrl, no Node APIs
• Unicode-safe — NFC/NFD canonical path layer, so Korean/Japanese/accented filenames sync correctly between macOS, Windows, and mobile
• Causal conflict resolution — per-device shard indexes with causal supersession (prev hash chain). Sequential edits merge silently even with device clock skew; only true concurrent edits become conflicts, and the losing version is always preserved in _sync-conflicts/
• Deletion safety — deletes propagate as tombstones; local deletions go to .trash/, never destroyed immediately
• Mass-delete guard — if a cycle would delete more than max(50, 5%) of your files, it is blocked until you explicitly approve
• Resilient transfers — per-file retry with backoff, checkpoint every 200 files, offline cycles resume where they left off
• Third-party plugin friendly — write-back rehash + suppression window prevents infinite ping-pong with plugins that rewrite files on modify (e.g. update-time-on-edit)

Setup

1. Enable a WebDAV server on your NAS (e.g. Synology: WebDAV Server package, HTTPS only). Create a dedicated user with access to a share such as obsidian-sync.
2. Install this plugin, then open its settings:
   • Server URL: https://your-nas.example.com:5006/obsidian-sync/your-vault
   • Username / password of the dedicated account
   • Press Test connection
3. Run Sync now (command palette, status bar on desktop, or add the command to your mobile toolbar). The first sync bootstraps safely: it never propagates deletions and preserves both sides of any difference.

Sync behavior

• Desktop: syncs on startup, after file changes (debounced), and on an interval (default 5 min).
• Mobile: iOS/Android cannot sync in the background (a platform restriction that applies to all sync solutions). Sync runs when the app is open, on the interval, or manually.
• Progress is shown as a file count. Logs: command Show sync log.

Commands

• Sync now
• Show sync log
• Reset skipped-file list — retry files that repeatedly failed
• Approve mass delete once — run a blocked mass deletion on the next cycle
• Rebuild remote index — recovery tool; re-reads the whole remote tree (downloads everything once)

Security notes

• Use HTTPS only. Create a NAS account dedicated to sync with access to a single share.
• Credentials are stored in the plugin's data.json inside your vault. If your vault is a git repository, add .obsidian/plugins/*/data.json to .gitignore — the plugin warns you if it is not covered.

License

MIT