Obsidian Livesync

I've been using for some years Microsoft OneNote for notes but for some time I've thought of migrating from it because I don't like that the notes are in Microsoft's proprietary format and are only saved in the cloud, I don't have a backup copy. What if MS makes a mistake and accidentally deletes my notes? Will they have a backup for my free account? What if MS ends OneNote, like Google ends apps suddenly? Where are my notes in useful format in such case?

I looked at many note taking apps and eventually after testing several I settled with Obsidian and Trillium. Because they saved their notes in open format (markdown files). However Obsidian, although free, is not opensource. It does seem to be one of the most popular note taking apps out there.

I first settled for Trillium as it had most of the functions I needed and out of the box allowed to syncing of notes and settings between devices. However I noticed that I didn't really like the look and feel of Trillium and installed Obsidian later. Obsidian works well for me with the help of some plugins (of which Obsidian has very plenty). 

I did miss one crucial function with Obsidian and it's partially a reason why at first I choose for Trillium and that is the ability to sync between devices. I tried several tips:

1. Put vault on sync drive like dropbox, onedrive. That resulted in sync errors when I enabled it on multiple devices.

2. A batch script to run Obsidian locally from a folder with the vault. It technically worked but was not very stable and not very user friendly

3. Finally I tried the livesync plugin. That failed also due to security issues.

I installed the live-plugin environment using this reddit posts instructions. And it seemed to work until I tried to enable end2end encryption then I got errors that it could not decrypt the vault no matter what I did. It's possible that I used a to long passphrase (I used bitwarden to generate the phrase with 6 words, a number and a special character). 

But another big no no with the live-sync plugin was that you connected to the couchDB using http, meaning you were sending the username/password in plain text. Only way to change that was running couchDB behind a reverse proxy but that was more hassle then I was willing to spend on a sync option that still might be buggy.

So after trying many things I caved in and paid the $4 / month for Obsidian's build in paid sync option and yep that just works out of the box. Maybe next year I'll see if I can find another solution. But in the time during I'm happy to sponsor a company that makes such a useful product.