pCloud Sync

pCloud Sync

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.
• Switching notes runs a quick sync of the note you left and the one you opened — one pass for both, quietly in the background; nothing visible happens by default. A full sync runs at startup and then every hour, just as quietly; in between, every 10 minutes, only what changed is synced — the files Obsidian saw you edit, add, move or delete, and whatever another device changed in pCloud. On a quiet vault that check is a single small request. A full sync recognises unchanged files from what Obsidian already knows about them instead of asking the disk about each one, so it takes seconds rather than minutes on a phone; every 12 hours it asks the disk after all, so a file another app changed without Obsidian noticing is picked up within half a day at the latest.
• Light on the device. The remote index is only downloaded when another device actually changed it, and the plugin's own settings file is only rewritten when something in it changed. The last-agreed text of each note (what paragraph-by-paragraph merging needs) is kept compressed in a single file inside the plugin's folder, added to rather than rewritten, instead of inside its settings file.
• 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. It asks once the files have been checked and carries straight on with your answer, without checking them all again. A background sync can't ask, so it tells you once that syncing is on hold; tap the sync icon (even while a sync is running) to answer.
• 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.
• Upload a troubleshooting log (in the settings, off by default) keeps a log of what this device's syncs did — file names and counts — and uploads it into the vault's own pCloud folder, as .pcloud-sync-debug/<device>.log. It goes nowhere but your pCloud, and is there so a sync misbehaving on a phone or tablet, where the console can't be read, can be looked into from another device.

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.