A More Reliable, Fast To Set Up Way Of Syncing Your Obsidian Folder With Syncthing

Using a cheap Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W to ensure your files are always up to date — especially useful for frequent offline usage

This article is about using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W as an additional, always-online device in our Syncthing network, to improve synchronization reliability. This is particularly useful for users who

• Want to sync to devices that aren’t always online
• Frequently edit the same file (e.g. to-do list) on different devices

If you are just here for the technical stuff and don’t want to bother reading the story around it and how I got there, go right here.

This also isn’t a full guide on how to install Syncthing on all your devices. There are plenty of great resources available that do just that.

Table of Contents

1. My Situation
2. The first attempt — problems
3. The final solution

My Situation

When I made the switch from RemNote to Obsidian a while ago, I was — as many other Obsidian newbies — overwhelmed with how to sync my files for free.

I wanted a free Option that would be easy to install and would work on all my devices (iOS, Android, Linux). I also didn’t feel like putting my entire life out on a Big Tech Server, like iCloud or Google Drive.

My workflows also included frequent editing of the same file (e.g. to-do list) on different devices, so using Git to sync also didn’t seem like a good solution and I settled with Syncthing.

The first attempt — problems

First, I installed and set up Syncthing on all my devices. Except for iOS — setting up Syncthing can be quite tedious here — everything else went along well and I had Syncthing up and running on all devices on the first day.

However, on the second day, I already began to experience some downsides of Syncthing. I had edited my to-do list on my commute without WiFi. After coming home and editing my to-do list on another device, I promptly got my first sync conflict.

For Syncthing to work, the devices have to be connected to the internet at the same time to receive changes, because Syncthing works locally.

This problem can be solved by having a device that is always online. Essentially, we would need to have a device acting as a server. At this point we might as well just use a cloud service, right?

Well, not necessarily. It turns out that a cheap Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W can be the solution to our problem.

The final solution

With a Raspberry Pi, or any similar cheap computing instance, we can create a device that is always online in our Syncthing network, omitting the need for personal devices to be online at the same time to receive changes.

Requirements

• Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (or similar)
• Power supply
• SD card 64+ GB (not more than 2 TB currently)
• Ethernet adapter/Raspberry Pi Hat + Ethernet cable (you can use WiFi too, but this won’t be quite as fast)
• Raspberry Pi Imager

The Setup itself is very straight-forward, and should be doable in 1–2 hours.

1. Setup your Raspberry Pi with SSH (Helpful guide, Official Raspberry Pi Documentation) and connect it to your Router with the Ethernet cable.
2. When using Ethernet, we can now disable WiFi. There are various ways to do this, but we want it to be persistent across reboots. For that, we need to edit the boot config at /boot/config.txt and insert the line dtoverlay=disable-wifi(sudo required). After rebooting, running ip addron your Raspberry Pi terminal should only show Ethernet as active connection.
3. Setup Syncthing on your Raspberry Pi (Helpful guide, Official Syncthing Documentation)