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.
• Opening or leaving a note runs a quick, single-file sync quietly in the background — nothing visible happens by default. A full sync also runs automatically at startup and every 10 minutes, just as quietly.
• 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, and uploads or notes over 25 MB are skipped on mobile with a clear message rather than risking a crash — sync those from desktop instead.
• 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 own settings never sync. Everything in the .obsidian folder — the font size, which plugins are enabled, hotkeys, the theme, CSS snippets, each plugin's own stored data — describes how one device is set up rather than what the vault holds, so every device keeps its own: nothing in there is uploaded, downloaded or deleted. A settings file an older version already copied up to pCloud is left where it is, inert — nothing takes it down again, and nothing deletes it from the other devices either.
• A sync that would delete most of the vault 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.
• 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 whole config folder (.obsidian/, or whatever the vault calls it) stays 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.
• 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.
• Files past the mobile size limit are listed separately from failures, as "too large for this device" — they aren't broken, they just need a desktop.
• 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.

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.