Syncthing on iOS/iPadOS

User Stories
1

There are quite a few “plain text productivity” apps that I use, such as Obsidian. I wanted to use Syncthing to sync my Obsidian notes to my iPhone and iPad, since it will not leave a copy “in the cloud.”

But iOS inability to run apps well in the background make it a frustrating experience. I installed Möbius Sync a while ago. I liked it, but running it in the background worked for maybe a day, before iOS would freeze the app and it would stop syncing completely till I popped the app.

So, I came up with a solution that has worked well so far. I created a Siri shortcut called “Open Obsidian.” The shortcut opens Möbius sync, pauses for 15 seconds (to allow files to sync), and then launches Obsidian and all my notes are there. You can obviously change the pause value to whatever you want to make sure all your data syncs over.

I do most of note creation on my Mac, so syncing back from the iPhone isn’t as much of an issue. But since I just opened Möbius sync, it should sync back to the Mac at some point, just not sure exactly when that’s going to happen.

So, that’s my user story.

1 Like
2

You may be interested in Synctrain. It is another iOS app (I made) that has a bit deeper integration with Shortcuts. You can e.g. tell it to sync for a while in the background.

2 Likes
3

I’ve been following your threads. I installed it about an hour ago, but haven’t set it up yet. Looks like your app is closer to ready for Syncthing 2.0 than Möbius sync is.

Impressed that both of you are keeping Syncthing working on iOS.

4

You’re able to sync Obsidian within 15 seconds? That’s pretty fast compared to mine. I use Syncback to sync Obsidian between my PC and my laptop, but I use Syncthing to sync between my PC and my Amazon tablet (because I could not get Syncback to work on the tablet. I use Obsidian for my TTRPGs and it is a large vault (though not as large as some).

5

The first sync will obviously take a lot longer. But the updates I do, I don’t see them taking more than 30 seconds.

Are you just syncing game notes, or all your PDF rulebooks also?

6

It syncs all my folders as I do make frequent changes and add things.

7

Then you could increase the pause to one or two minutes. But you’re on Android, so that’s a different experience.

I have a friend who’s using Nextcloud on Android to bidirectionally sync his Obsidian data and he doesn’t have any issue. That might be worth investigating for you.

8

I never really thought of it as having an issue. The system runs fine as is but just takes a while to update. I haven’t used it in awhile but I will check to see if I can get it to sync again and let you know how long it takes.

9

It seems I am having a bit of an issue. I had to add a folder (with permissions) that has a few different types of decks in it with jpegs for the card images. It synced 2 of the 5 folders in there no problem but stopped on the 3rd. It said it was still in the process of syncing and the folder was there but nothing in it, it just sat there for like 5 minutes doing nothing. After I restarted syncthing on both devices the folder synced, but the last two folders would not. I restarted syncthing on both devices multiple times with no effect. I then added a temp folder with a temp text file and restarted the syncthing services and it finally finished syncing everything.