Every method in my guide to syncing an Obsidian vault across devices got a section except this one. For about a year the Google Drive section basically said “don’t.”
Google Drive is the cloud storage that the largest number of people already have, already pay for, and already have 15GB sitting idle in. It is also, of the four big consumer clouds, the one Obsidian gets along with worst.
The answer is better now than it was. But only by degree. There are four real paths, all of them have a catch, and two of them are plugins with the same name written by different people. That last one alone has cost the Obsidian forums more confusion than any other sync question I have looked at. I am going to walk all four, name the catch on each, and then tell you when to stop trying.
- Why Google Drive Is the Hard One
- The Desktop Path: Mirror, Never Stream
- The Two Plugins That Have the Same Name
- Remotely Save PRO, the Boring Paid Route
- Android, Which Everybody Assumes Is Easy
- The 15GB Argument
- Should You Just Use Something Else?
Why Google Drive Is the Hard One
Dropbox syncs a folder. iCloud syncs a folder, badly, but it syncs a folder. Google Drive for Desktop decided a folder was ambitious.
The current desktop client defaults to streaming , which mounts your Drive as a virtual filesystem. Files show up in the file browser, but the bytes are not on your disk until something asks for them. For photos and spreadsheets that works. For a vault it is a disaster.
Obsidian watches the vault directory for changes. That watcher expects a real filesystem underneath it, where a file that exists is a file you can read right now. A virtual drive breaks that assumption. You get notes that open blank and populate a second later. You get link resolution that misses files it should find. You get the plugin folder behaving strangely because a plugin tried to read its own settings before Drive had gotten around to materializing them.
None of this fails loudly. Instead, it fails as weirdness, and you spend a week thinking Obsidian is buggy.
The Desktop Path: Mirror, Never Stream
If you are going to do this on desktop, there is exactly one correct setting and it is not the default.
In Drive for Desktop, open Settings, then Preferences, then Folders from Drive in the left sidebar. Under “My Drive syncing options,” switch from Stream files to Mirror files. Mirroring keeps a full local copy on disk and syncs changes up. That is the behavior a vault needs, because now Obsidian is watching a real directory full of real files.
Let any in-flight sync finish before you flip that switch. Google’s own docs warn about changing sync modes mid-sync, and this is not the folder you want to find out on.
Then put the vault somewhere sane:
~/Google Drive/My Drive/Obsidian/VaultName/
One vault per folder. Do not nest a vault inside another vault, and do not point Obsidian at My Drive itself, because you will end up with the watcher trying to index every PDF you have saved since 2014.
Two things to know before you commit to this. Mirroring means the vault takes up its full size on every desktop you do this on, which for a text vault is nothing and for a vault full of PDFs is not nothing. And Drive’s conflict handling is to make a second file with a different name. It does not merge. It does not ask. You get Note.md and Note (1).md and it is on you to notice.
That last part is true of Dropbox too, and I covered how to live with it in the Dropbox sync post.
The Two Plugins That Have the Same Name
This is the part that wastes people’s afternoons.
There are two different Obsidian plugins both called “Google Drive Sync.” Different authors, different designs, different tradeoffs. Every forum thread I have read about Drive sync has at least one person answering about the wrong one. Search the community plugin browser and you find exactly one of them. Search GitHub and the top result is the other.
The one in the plugin directory: richardx366
Obsidian-Google-Drive by richardx366 is the one you can install the normal way, because it is in the official community plugin list as “Google Drive Sync.” As of this writing it is on version 3.1.1 and was updated within the last week, which is more than I can say for the alternative.
It exists specifically to solve the iOS problem, and the README says so: “A plugin to make Obsidian work in Google Drive to enable access to iOS.”
The thing to understand before you install it is how the auth works. You do not create your own Google Cloud project. You authenticate through a hosted service at ogd.richardxiong.com and paste the resulting refresh token into the plugin settings. That is a real convenience and it is also a third party sitting in the path between Obsidian and your Drive. You can point it at a self-hosted token endpoint instead if that bothers you, and if you are the kind of person it bothers, it should, and you should.
Its README carries its own warnings. Back up first. Do not manually add files to the synced Drive folder, because it “will likely break functionality, potentially causing data loss.” Do not edit vault files outside Obsidian. Let syncs finish before you close the app.
The one everybody links to: stravo1
obsidian-gdrive-sync by stravo1 has about three times the stars, which is why it is the one that shows up in every search result and every Reddit answer. It works on desktop, Android, and iOS.
It is not in the community plugin directory. The author’s own README explains why, and I would rather quote it than paraphrase it:
The plugin is under active development, new releases might introduce bugs, old releases maybe be incompatible with the new ones. This might lead to data loss.
That is a developer telling you to back up first. The author has said they will not submit it to the official list until it is stable enough not to risk anybody’s notes.
Two documented limits on top of that. It is not optimized for vaults over about 1,000 files , with large-vault work listed as in progress. And on iOS there is no normal install path for a plugin outside the directory, so you set the vault up on a desktop that already has the plugin working and copy the whole thing across.
Installing it means BRAT or doing it by hand: download the release zip, extract, drop the folder into .obsidian/plugins/, enable it. The plugin install walkthrough covers the mechanics if you have never sideloaded one.
Which one
If you want a plugin and you want it maintained, richardx366’s is the current answer, and the price is the hosted token service. If that price is unacceptable and you will not self-host the endpoint, stravo1’s is the alternative, and the price is that you are running release-candidate software that has been quiet for four months ago.
Remotely Save PRO, the Boring Paid Route
Remotely Save is the plugin most people in this cluster end up on, and its free tier covers S3-compatible storage, Dropbox, WebDAV, and basic OneDrive with no account at all. Google Drive is not on that list. Drive support sits behind PRO , which needs an account at remotelysave.com separate from anything Obsidian.
PRO is free during beta, currently stated through January 1, 2027. The price after that has not been announced. I am flagging that plainly because “free right now” and “free” are different words, and signing up for an unnamed number later is a decision you should make on purpose.
What you get for it is the thing the stravo1 plugin does not have yet: maturity. Remotely Save has been syncing vaults to object storage for years, it handles conflicts with more grace than “make a second file,” and it is in the official directory.
Android, Which Everybody Assumes Is Easy
The assumption goes: Google Drive is a Google product, Android is a Google product, so this must be the one place it just works.
It is not. Mirror mode is the thing that makes the desktop path work, and mirror mode is a feature of Drive for Desktop. Drive for Desktop is, as the name has been telling you this whole time, a desktop application. Nothing in the Android Drive app gives Obsidian a real local directory that a file watcher can sit on top of.
That leaves you with in-app sync, which means either the stravo1 plugin or Remotely Save PRO. Both of them run inside Obsidian and talk to the API.
There is a second Android trap underneath this one, and you meet it before you sync anything. Since Obsidian 1.8.10, Android asks where the vault should live: app storage or device storage. Obsidian recommends device storage, and the reason is that app storage isolates the vault from every other app on the phone. That blocks external tools like Syncthing, and it means uninstalling Obsidian deletes your local vault.
For Drive specifically that trap is survivable, because Obsidian Sync and community sync plugins both still work under app storage. Your Drive plugin keeps running either way. Device storage is still the safer pick, and why is explained in the Android sync post.
The 15GB Argument
Here is the case for going through all of this.
Google gives you 15GB free, shared across Drive, Gmail, and Photos. Dropbox gives you 2GB. A text vault will never come close to either number, but a vault with a few hundred PDFs and a year of screenshots will blow right past 2GB. If you are already on a Google One plan, the storage is free.
That is a real argument, but not the only variable. The question is “which cloud will cost me an afternoon of untangling duplicate notes in March.”
Should You Just Use Something Else?
For Google Drive specifically, more often than not: yes.
I don’t say that about the other methods in this cluster. Dropbox is fine. Syncthing is free, private, and works. iCloud works if you are all-Apple. Each of those has a type of user it fits well.
Google Drive’s problem is that every path asks you for something the alternatives do not. Mirror mode and a folder Drive duplicate on conflict. A maintained plugin that routes your auth through somebody else’s server. A more popular plugin that stopped shipping in May. Or a paid tier whose price nobody has announced yet. None of those is disqualifying on its own. It is that Drive is the only method in this cluster where you have to pick which one you mind least.
So use Google Drive if the storage is a hard requirement. Company account, family plan, a 15GB library of attachments you are not moving.
If it is a preference rather than a requirement, point Remotely Save at S3 or Dropbox and get on with your life. Or run Syncthing and stop paying anybody. Same outcome, fewer README warnings.
And whichever you pick: back the vault up somewhere that is not the thing you are syncing with. Sync is not backup. A method that replicates your mistake to four devices in under a second is not protecting you, and Google Drive is very, very fast.
