pCloud Sync

Private source reviewed

An Obsidian plugin that mirrors the whole vault into a pCloud folder as plain, unencrypted files, optimized for mobile too — they can be opened straight from pCloud's own app or web interface, and cloned back down onto any other device (desktop or mobile) with this same plugin.

Requires a pCloud account. This plugin's only network use is talking directly to pCloud's own API to read and write your vault's files — no other server is involved, and nothing is sent anywhere except to the pCloud account you log into.

• One sync button (ribbon icon, spins while syncing) — no separate upload/download, both directions run in a single pass. Only one sync ever runs at a time, and however many times the button is tapped there is only ever one indicator on screen — naming the file being synced right now, so a long pass is never just a spinner.
• Switching notes runs a quick sync of the note you left and the one you opened — one pass for both, quietly in the background; nothing visible happens by default. A full sync runs at startup and then every hour, just as quietly; in between, every 10 minutes, only what changed is synced — the files Obsidian saw you edit, add, move or delete, and whatever another device changed in pCloud. On a quiet vault that check is a single small request. A full sync recognises unchanged files from what Obsidian already knows about them instead of asking the disk about each one, so it takes seconds rather than minutes on a phone; every 12 hours it asks the disk after all, so a file another app changed without Obsidian noticing is picked up within half a day at the latest.
• Light on the device. The remote index is only downloaded when another device actually changed it, and the plugin's own settings file is only rewritten when something in it changed. The last-agreed text of each note (what paragraph-by-paragraph merging needs) is kept compressed in a single file inside the plugin's folder, added to rather than rewritten, instead of inside its settings file.
• Up to 3 files transfer at once on desktop (1 on mobile, and large files always get a lane of their own) — small notes still sync at full speed either way. The small files go first, so a sync cut short on a phone has settled as many files as it could rather than half of one video.
• Downloads always arrive in small pieces rather than all at once. There is no size limit on mobile, but Obsidian gives a plugin no way to read part of a file on a phone, so uploading a large file there, and reading it the first time, holds the whole file in memory. With a very large file (hundreds of MB) the mobile app can be shut down by the system partway through — upload such files from a computer, where they are read from disk in pieces (above 64 MB) and a slow line gets time to finish (an upload is allowed at least as long as it takes at 128 KB/s).
• Downloads are checked. An HTTP error is an error, never saved as the file, and a download whose content differs from what the remote index promised is compared with what pCloud itself reports before anything on your device is touched.
• Nothing a sync deletes or overwrites is lost for 30 days. The old content goes to a quarantine in the plugin's folder (up to 10 GB, never less than the last 7 days) and can be restored from the settings or the "Quarantine…" command; a file whose place is taken by something else comes back beside it as a "(conflict …)" copy. It takes up space on the device, is never synced, and is removed if the plugin is uninstalled.
• Show sync activity (command) lists what this device's syncs recently did to files — deletions, overwrites, merges, uploads — read from a local log kept for 12 months. Always on, never uploaded.
• The first sync with a folder is always started by hand, and shows a preview first: how many files it would download, upload, delete or merge, how big, and where. On a new device or after changing the remote folder nothing syncs in the background until you tap the sync icon. Preview sync shows the same on demand and changes nothing.
• A file that is missing from the remote index but still in pCloud is not deleted from your device: the index entry was lost, so it is put back.
• An interrupted sync picks up where it stopped. Progress is written back to disk as the sync runs, not only once it finishes, and a large download that was cut short — a dropped connection, the app closed, the phone reclaiming memory — resumes from the byte it reached instead of starting the file over. On a phone with a big vault, that's the difference between getting there eventually and never finishing at all.
• The screen stays on while a full sync runs, so a phone or tablet doesn't doze off and freeze the sync halfway (a sleeping device pauses Obsidian entirely). It only holds while Obsidian is in front — switching to another app still pauses the sync, which then resumes from where it stopped.
• Individual transfers retry a few times before giving up, and a pCloud download link that expired or stopped working after a network change is quietly replaced with a fresh one mid-transfer.
• If a Markdown note was edited on both sides since the last sync, the plugin merges it paragraph by paragraph (line by line) — a three-way (base/local/remote) merge algorithm. No separate "conflict" file is ever created: the losing (older) paragraph stays right in the same note, struck through and flagged with a warning line; the winner is left untouched and unmarked.
• Binary files (images, attachments) have no meaningful way to merge their bytes — both versions survive there: the newer one at the original path, the older one next to it as a timestamped copy.
• Obsidian's settings sync too — all but the plugins, which plugins are enabled, and the open tabs. Every settings file at the top of the .obsidian folder goes along: bookmarks, the daily note's folder and format, the template folder, hotkeys, property types, app.json, appearance.json — and the themes and snippets folders the appearance settings point to. So a vault copied from pCloud onto a new device arrives set up the same way. Settings merge whole-file (the newer version wins, the older one is kept beside it), with one exception: on a device's very first sync, pCloud's copy wins, so the defaults a freshly opened vault has just written don't overwrite the settings every other device uses (the device's own copy is still kept beside it). Bookmarks, the daily-note, template and other core-plugin settings, hotkeys and property types that come down take effect straight away; the rest (theme, editor options) from the next start of Obsidian, which a notice says. What stays on each device: the lists of enabled core and community plugins (core-plugins.json, community-plugins.json, so the phone and the desktop can run different sets), the plugins folder — each plugin's code and stored data, this plugin's own login and sync state among them — and workspace.json / workspace-mobile.json, the open tabs and pane layout. Plugins themselves are not installed or switched on by the sync: on a new device install and enable them once.
• A sync that would delete a fifth or more of the vault (at least 25 files) on one side stops and asks first — and offers to copy the surviving side back instead of deleting, which is what an unexpectedly empty remote folder (a switched pCloud account, a re-created folder, a reset manifest) almost always calls for. It asks once the files have been checked and carries straight on with your answer, without checking them all again. A background sync can't ask, so it tells you once that syncing is on hold; tap the sync icon (even while a sync is running) to answer.
• The same goes for a sync that would merge a fifth or more of the vault's files (at least 25) changed on both sides, and for a device connecting to a folder that already holds different versions of its files: it asks whose version keeps the name — pCloud's, this device's, or the newer one — and the other is always kept beside it as a "(conflict …)" copy.
• Changing the remote folder asks for confirmation (showing how many files the new folder lists) and is refused while a sync is running; it is not saved while you type. A device's sync state belongs to the folder and account it was built against: after a change, or a switch of pCloud account, the device forgets it and its first sync with the new folder runs as a connection — nothing is deleted, conflicts are asked about. No sync starts by itself afterwards; use the sync icon.
• On mobile, signing in leads with pCloud's copy-a-code method rather than the browser hand-off — the obsidian:// link that hand-off relies on often doesn't make it back to the app on a phone. Desktop still uses the hand-off, where it is reliable.
• The settings tab shows how full the connected pCloud account is. A full account refuses every upload with an error that says nothing about space, so it's worth seeing coming.
• Logging in uses pCloud's own OAuth sign-in page (opened in your browser) — the plugin never sees your password, only the access token pCloud hands back afterward. The pCloud app behind that sign-in page is registered once by this plugin's maintainer; installing or using the plugin never requires registering your own app.

Installing

• Community Plugins (once listed): Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search for "pCloud Sync".
• BRAT: add this repository (laszlorepassy/pcloud-sync) in BRAT's "Add a beta plugin" dialog.
• Manual: download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/pcloud-vault-clone/, then enable it under Obsidian Settings → Community plugins.

Good to know

• The config folder's plugins subfolder and the pane layout (workspace.json) stay out of the sync — this plugin's own settings, its cache and the last-agreed text snapshot Markdown merging needs included.
• Excluded by default on top of that: .trash/**, .git/** — per-device state, not content. The list can be extended or narrowed in the settings (type, then Apply). Excluding a path affects this device only: the file and its index entry stay in pCloud and other devices keep syncing it. Deleting the excluded files from pCloud is a separate, confirmed step (Remove excluded files from pCloud); other devices that don't exclude them will then treat them as deleted.
• A .vault-clone-manifest.json file is created at the root of the remote folder to track what's out there and its hashes — don't edit it by hand. Once per device the plugin also checks the folder itself against that index: a file the index lists but pCloud doesn't actually hold is uploaded again from this device's copy, rather than quietly staying unreachable from every device.
• A deletion never beats an edit: if you deleted a file on one side while it was changed on the other in the meantime, the edit wins and the file comes back where it was deleted.
• A large vault's first full sync is naturally slower (every file has to be read and hashed once) — after that, only files that actually changed get transferred. On a phone it may well take several syncs to get through that first one; each picks up where the last left off, so every attempt makes real progress even if it's cut short.
• A device that cannot take a file reports it separately from failures, as "too large for this device" (no device is limited this way at the moment).
• A sync skips opening a file whose modification time and size haven't moved since it was last read — that's what keeps a large vault fast. Re-check every file (in the settings, or the command of the same name) throws that away and reads the whole vault again. It's the way to settle any doubt that a device's record of a file has drifted out of step with the file itself, since an ordinary sync would never open it again to find out. Nothing is deleted; it simply takes considerably longer than a normal sync.
• Upload a troubleshooting log (in the settings, off by default) keeps a log of what this device's syncs did — file names and counts — and uploads it into the vault's own pCloud folder, as .pcloud-sync-debug/<device>.log. It goes nowhere but your pCloud, and is there so a sync misbehaving on a phone or tablet, where the console can't be read, can be looked into from another device.

Source code

This repository hosts the plugin's public releases. The source code is developed in a private repository and is available to the Obsidian team for review through the Community Directory's private-source-repository verification.