Simple Backup

Simple Backup

A minimal Obsidian plugin with a single job: copy your entire vault to a folder of your choice, timestamped and versioned, without ever slowing down Obsidian.

Why

Most sync/backup plugins are built around cloud services, conflict resolution, or partial sync. Simple Backup does none of that — it just makes a plain, timestamped copy of the vault on a schedule (or on demand), and prunes old copies according to a retention policy you control. If you already sync your vault another way and just want a local (or network-drive) safety net, this is it.

How it works

• On each run, Simple Backup copies the vault using fully asynchronous file operations (Node's fs.promises), so the actual disk I/O runs on a background thread pool instead of Obsidian's UI thread — the interface never freezes or stutters during a backup, even a large one.
• The vault is copied into <target>/<vault-name>-<YYYY-MM-DD-HHmm>/.
• Common junk/VCS folders (node_modules, .git, .trash, OS metadata files, etc.) are excluded by default and configurable.
• After every backup, a retention policy (keep N daily / N weekly / N monthly snapshots) prunes old backups automatically. The snapshot that was just created is always kept.
• Only errors are logged, to backup-errors.log inside the plugin's own folder — there is no verbose success log to sift through.

Features

• Manual trigger: ribbon icon and a command palette entry ("Run backup now").
• Scheduled triggers (each independently toggleable):
  • On Obsidian startup
  • Hourly
  • Daily, at a configurable time. If it fails (say, the target drive isn't plugged in), it's retried every 30 minutes, up to 3 times that day.
• Live progress notice: a small, single, continuously-updating notification shows roughly how far the current backup has gotten (files copied, size so far).
• Stays awake while backing up: the computer won't go to sleep in the middle of a backup, even with Obsidian minimized (the screen may still turn off). Where Obsidian doesn't expose the system's sleep blocker, it falls back to keeping the screen on, which only works while the window is visible. If the system refuses both, the backup simply runs as before.
• Big files on slow drives: a file copy is only abandoned if it makes no progress at all for a minute, so large files on a slow network or USB drive are backed up no matter how long they take.
• Retention/rotation: configurable number of daily/weekly/monthly snapshots to keep; everything else gets deleted automatically at the end of each run.
• Folder picker: a native "Browse…" button next to the target directory field (uses Electron's dialog on desktop).
• Configurable exclude list for files/folders that shouldn't be copied.

Settings

Requirements

• Desktop only (Windows/macOS/Linux). The plugin relies on Node.js's fs module and (optionally) Electron's native dialog, neither of which is available in Obsidian Mobile — the plugin is marked isDesktopOnly and won't load on iOS/Android.

Installation (manual)

1. Copy manifest.json and main.js into <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/simple-backup/.
2. Reload Obsidian (or toggle the plugin off/on) and enable Simple Backup under Settings → Community plugins.
3. Open the plugin's settings and set a target directory before running your first backup.

Known limitations

• No separate OS process. An earlier version of this plugin ran the copy in a spawned child process at a lowered OS scheduling priority. In practice, Obsidian's Electron build silently ignores the standard mechanism for turning its own executable into a plain Node process (ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE), so the spawned "child" never actually ran the worker script — it just exited immediately. Rather than depend on that, the backup now runs inside Obsidian's own process using fully asynchronous I/O, which keeps the UI responsive without needing a second process at all. The trade-off is that the copy no longer gets a lowered OS priority of its own — in practice this is a non-issue, since copying is I/O-bound, not CPU-bound. It's also why there's no "run on shutdown" option: without a surviving separate process, a backup triggered on close could only ever be a best-effort race against Obsidian actually exiting, which isn't a promise worth making. Use "Run on startup" or a scheduled time instead.
• A backup interrupted mid-copy (Obsidian closed before it finished, machine lost power, target drive disconnected) is left exactly as it is — it's never auto-deleted, but it's also excluded from the daily/weekly/monthly retention accounting, so it won't accidentally count as "the latest good snapshot" either. Clean it up manually if you find one (it has no .backup-complete marker file inside it).
• Keep the target directory outside the vault. It can't be the vault itself. It can technically be a folder inside the vault, and it's then left out of its own snapshots, but Obsidian would index every snapshot as more notes (duplicates in search, the graph and the quick switcher) — so the settings show a warning, unless it's a hidden folder whose name starts with a dot (e.g. .backups), which Obsidian doesn't index.
• Folders or files the target can't hold (e.g. names containing : or ? when backing up from macOS/Linux to an NTFS, exFAT or SMB drive) are skipped and listed in backup-errors.log; the rest of the backup goes ahead.
• The "Browse…" folder picker depends on Electron's remote.dialog, which isn't part of every Obsidian/Electron build. If it's unavailable, the button shows a notice and you can still type the path in by hand.

Project layout

• src/main.js — the plugin entry point: settings UI, scheduling, and the ribbon icon/command.
• backup-core.js — the BackupRun class and helpers that do the actual asynchronous copying and retention. Required by src/main.js and by the test suite.
• build.js — bundles src/main.js + backup-core.js into a single, self-contained main.js at the repo root (via esbuild). Run npm run build after editing either source file.
• main.js (repo root) — the generated, distributable build output. This is the file that actually ships — don't edit it directly, it's overwritten by npm run build. It has to be self-contained because Obsidian's community plugin installer and BRAT only ever fetch manifest.json, main.js, and styles.css — nothing else.
• manifest.json — standard Obsidian plugin manifest.

License

MIT