Obsidian Dropbox Sync: A Setup Guide

I have synced my Obsidian vaults through Dropbox since I started using Obsidian.

Today I ran one command across my whole Dropbox folder to see how much damage that did:

find ~/Dropbox -name "*conflicted copy*" | wc -l

6,735.

Of those, 6,517 are inside my Obsidian vaults, dating back to October 2023. And not one of them is a note. Every Dropbox-plus-Obsidian guide warns you that Dropbox is going to shred your notes, and in all that time it has never shredded one of mine. It shreds something else, constantly.

If you are still deciding which method to use, start with my guide to syncing Obsidian for free on every device, which is the “which one” page. This one assumes you already picked Dropbox and want to run it without losing anything.

• Desktop to Desktop Is Already Solved
• Mobile Is Where Dropbox Stops Being Dropbox
• The Remotely Save Trap That Quietly Duplicates Your Vault
• What Actually Conflicts, and It Is Not Your Notes
• Teach Dropbox to Ignore the Machinery
• Does an Obsidian Vault Blow Past the 2GB Free Tier?
• Dropbox Versus Obsidian Sync, With Real Numbers
• Cleaning Up the Conflicted Copies You Already Have
• Frequently Asked Questions
• What I Would Tell Someone Starting Today

Desktop to Desktop Is Already Solved

Put the vault in your Dropbox folder. Install Dropbox on the other computer. Open the vault. Done.

That is the whole setup. Dropbox has done real two-way folder sync on desktop for a very long time and it is genuinely good at it.

There are exactly two settings that turn this from “solved” into “where did my vault go,”:

• Selective sync removes a folder from your hard drive while keeping it in your account. Dropbox’s own docs call it a way “to save space on your computer without deleting the files themselves,” which is true and also means Obsidian opens to an empty vault.
• Online-only files are worse, because they look like they work. The file stays visible as a placeholder and downloads when something opens it. Fine for a folder of PDFs. Not fine for Obsidian, which walks every file in the vault to build its link graph and search index on every launch. You are asking a note app to stream 2,700 files off the network before it can show you a backlink.

Keep the vault local and available offline. If you need disk space, make some other folder online-only.

Mobile Is Where Dropbox Stops Being Dropbox

The Dropbox mobile app is not a sync client. It is a file browser with an offline toggle, and Obsidian mobile needs a real folder full of real files sitting on the device.

Offline files live inside the Dropbox app rather than in a folder your other apps can open. And making an entire folder available offline “is only available to customers on Dropbox Plus, Family, Professional, Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise plans,” so on a free account you can’t do this.

So on desktop, Dropbox is the whole answer. On mobile, Dropbox is storage and something else does the syncing.

On iPhone and iPad, that something else is Remotely Save, a plugin that runs inside Obsidian and talks to the Dropbox API directly. iOS never lets an outside app near the vault, so the sync has to happen from inside. That is covered in more depth in my guide to syncing Obsidian on iPhone and iPad for free.

On Android, you get a choice, and it was made for you back when you created the vault. Android asks whether to put the vault in device storage or app storage, and app storage means no outside app can ever see the vault, which rules out every folder-sync tool. If your vault is in device storage, Dropsync from MetaCtrl does real two-way folder sync against Dropbox and is still actively developed. If it is in app storage, you are back to Remotely Save. I went through that whole decision in how to sync Obsidian on Android for free.

The Remotely Save Trap That Quietly Duplicates Your Vault

Dropbox is in Remotely Save’s free tier. You do not need PRO for it. Install the plugin the usual way, open its settings, pick Dropbox, hit Auth, follow the link, approve, and come back. Two minutes.

Then read the permission text on that approval screen. The plugin gets to “read and write files in your Dropbox’s /Apps/remotely-save folder.” Not your Dropbox. That folder.

Say your desktop vault lives at ~/Dropbox/Notes/Writing, which is a completely sensible place to put it. You install Remotely Save on your phone, authorize Dropbox, and it starts syncing to /Apps/remotely-save/Writing instead. You now have two vaults in one Dropbox account. Your laptop writes to one, your phone writes to the other and neither knows the other exists.

The fix is stupid: move your desktop vault into the app folder. Here is my actual machine:

$ ls -d ~/Dropbox/Apps/remotely-save/*/
/Users/eristoddle/Dropbox/Apps/remotely-save/Eristoddle-Org/
/Users/eristoddle/Dropbox/Apps/remotely-save/Test/
/Users/eristoddle/Dropbox/Apps/remotely-save/The Novelist/
/Users/eristoddle/Dropbox/Apps/remotely-save/Writing/

Four vaults, all living where the plugin already has permission. Desktop Dropbox syncs that folder like any other folder. Mobile Remotely Save syncs into the same place.

What Actually Conflicts, and It Is Not Your Notes

Back to those 6,517 conflicted copies. Here is where they live in my main vault:

Zero. In almost three years.

Once you see it, the reason is obvious. A markdown note is a few kilobytes, you edit it on one device at a time, and you type slower than Dropbox syncs. The window where two machines write the same note is about as wide as the odds of you opening that note on your phone and your laptop within the same ninety seconds.

Plugin state is the opposite of all of that. workspace.json gets rewritten every time you move a pane. A plugin’s data.json gets rewritten on every settings change and sometimes on a timer. An embeddings cache gets rewritten by whichever instance is indexing, which is all of them, all the time. Two Obsidian windows on two machines hammer those files whether or not you are touching a note. Of my .obsidian conflicts, 675 are some plugin’s data.json and 93 are workspace.json.

And I will own the dumbest row in that table. Those 35 conflicts in .git/ exist because I run the Obsidian Git plugin on a vault that also lives in Dropbox, which is precisely the “never run two sync systems on one vault” rule I wrote in the pillar post. Which is the ideal, but since I haven’t lost anything, who cares.

Teach Dropbox to Ignore the Machinery

Dropbox has a real ignore feature that hardly gets used, probably because it is an extended file attribute instead of a dotfile. On macOS with the classic Dropbox folder at ~/Dropbox:

xattr -w com.dropbox.ignored 1 ~/Dropbox/Apps/remotely-save/Writing/.smart-env

If macOS has moved your Dropbox to ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox, it is the File Provider variant instead (and this took me a while to realize):

xattr -w 'com.apple.fileprovider.ignore#P' 1 ~/Library/CloudStorage/Dropbox/path/to/.smart-env

Windows, in PowerShell:

Set-Content -Path 'C:\Users\you\Dropbox\Writing\.smart-env' -Stream com.dropbox.ignored -Value 1

Linux:

attr -s com.dropbox.ignored -V 1 ~/Dropbox/Writing/.smart-env

Now read the warning that comes with it. From Dropbox’s docs: the ignored file “will be deleted from the Dropbox server and your other devices.”

That is a delete, not an exclude. So do not point it at .obsidian wholesale unless you genuinely want separate plugin setups per device, which some people do. Point it at the caches that regenerate themselves and are worthless to move between machines:

• .smart-env/ or whatever your AI plugin calls its embeddings cache
• .trash/
• .git/ if you are syncing that vault with git too
• .obsidian/workspace.json, if you are tired of your phone’s pane layout landing on your desktop

The other catch: the attribute is local to the machine you set it on. Set it on one laptop and your other laptop will happily regenerate the file and upload it again. You have to set it everywhere. Annoying, but it is a five-minute job that ends a problem which has been running since 2023. Will I fix it on my devices? Has anything broken yet? Same answer and laziness wins.

Does an Obsidian Vault Blow Past the 2GB Free Tier?

Dropbox Basic is 2 GB. Every guide tells you a text vault will never come close. Let me check that against a real one.

My Writing vault, 2,727 markdown notes accumulated over years of daily use:

$ find Writing -name "*.md" -not -path "*/.obsidian/*" -exec cat {} + | wc -c

67.5 MB.

So yes, the guides are right. My notes are 3% of the free tier and I could write at this pace until I die without filling it.

The vault on disk is 7.6 GB.

The notes are a rounding error. The vault is almost four times over the free tier, and every bit of the overage is git history, plugin binaries, an embeddings cache, and images I pasted in without thinking. So the ignore attribute in the last section is not a tidiness exercise. On a free Dropbox account it is the difference between this working and not working at all.

Dropbox Versus Obsidian Sync, With Real Numbers

The comparison people actually want is whether to keep doing this or just pay Obsidian.

Obsidian Sync Standard is $5 a month, or $4 a month billed annually. You get 1 GB of storage, a 5 MB maximum file size, and 1 month of version history. Sync Plus is $10 a month, or $8 annually, for 10 GB, 200 MB files, and 12 months of history.

Dropbox lists Plus at $9.99 a month for 2 TB, and Basic at 2 GB free.

So the math splits three ways.

You already pay for Dropbox. Dropbox plus Remotely Save costs zero additional dollars, and Sync Standard is $48 a year to solve problems you mostly do not have. This is me. This is why I have never subscribed.

You pay for nothing yet. Free Dropbox is 2 GB and Sync Standard is 1 GB, so on raw storage the free tier wins, but only if you keep the machinery out of the vault. Closer than it looks.

You have big attachments. Sync Standard’s 5 MB per-file cap is brutal, and one phone photo can exceed it. Dropbox’s limits are nowhere near anything a vault will hit. If your vault holds PDFs or images, Sync Standard is out and you are comparing against Sync Plus at $96 a year.

What the $48 buys is conflict handling and version history. Obsidian Sync resolves conflicts at the note level and keeps a month of history. Dropbox knows what a byte range is and forks the file. For me that has been worth nothing, because the things Dropbox forks are caches. If you routinely write on two devices at once, it is worth more.

Cleaning Up the Conflicted Copies You Already Have

Look before you delete. This lists them:

find ~/Dropbox/Apps/remotely-save -name "*conflicted copy*" | head -50

Confirm every hit is inside a .obsidian, .smart-env, .trash, or .git folder. If any of them is an actual note, stop and diff it against the original, because that is a real edit of yours that lost a race.

Then, once you are sure, delete only what is inside those folders rather than everything that matched:

find ~/Dropbox/Apps/remotely-save \
  \( -path "*/.obsidian/*" -o -path "*/.smart-env/*" -o -path "*/.git/*" -o -path "*/.trash/*" \) \
  -name "*conflicted copy*" -type f -delete

Quit Obsidian on every device first. Otherwise a running instance rewrites its cache mid-delete and you get to do it again.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you use Dropbox with Obsidian? Yes. On desktop it needs no plugin at all: put the vault in your Dropbox folder and install Dropbox on both computers. On mobile you need Remotely Save or, on Android with a device-storage vault, a folder-sync app like Dropsync.

Is Obsidian Sync better than Dropbox? It handles conflicts better and it is the only one that understands notes rather than bytes. Dropbox is better on file size, storage, and cost if you already subscribe. If you write on two devices simultaneously, pay for Sync. If you do not, Dropbox has been fine for me for years.

How do I sync Obsidian with Dropbox on iPhone? Install Remotely Save from the community plugins browser, choose Dropbox, hit Auth, and approve. The Dropbox iOS app cannot do it on its own, because it does not sync folders to the device.

Does Obsidian work with Dropbox on Android? Yes, two ways. If the vault is in device storage, Dropsync or FolderSync does real two-way folder sync. If it is in app storage, no outside app can reach the vault, so use Remotely Save.

Will Dropbox corrupt my Obsidian vault? In my experience it has never touched a note. It does fork plugin caches and workspace files constantly, which produces thousands of junk files and can quietly blow past the free tier. The fix is the ignore attribute, not a different sync tool.

Do I need Dropbox Plus for Obsidian? Not for the notes. 2,727 of mine are 67.5 MB total. You need it if your vault carries big attachments, git history, or an AI plugin cache, and the cheaper answer there is to exclude those from sync.

What I Would Tell Someone Starting Today

Put the vault in Dropbox/Apps/remotely-save/YourVault on day one, before you have a phone copy to reconcile. Ignore the caches on every machine before they generate three years of garbage. Keep the folder local, never online-only. Do not also run git on it, which I say as a person still doing exactly that.

Then stop thinking about it. Dropbox is not the best sync engine for Obsidian, because it is a general-purpose file syncer with no idea what a wikilink is. But Dropbox is already installed, already paid for, already running, and the failure mode is 6,517 junk files instead of a lost draft.

I will take that trade. I have been taking it since 2023.