Backing up obsidian

This thread gives pointers about saving your “second brain”. It is intended for people working with Obsidian on a regular basis who are not experts in computer administration. Although, I read some posts about data loss from people posting on infosec instances that made me scratch my head …

First of: Syncing is no backup!

A backup has to protect you against two main risks:

1. Something goes wrong with your hard- or software. That means you lose data because of an external event.
2. Something goes wrong on your end. This will most likely mean that you delete a file or change an important paragraph and a couple of weeks later you realize that you would like your old data back, please.

Syncing will protect you against the first risk, but it will happily propagate all your changes to your synced devices. The solution to the second risk is historicization, meaning that your backup will keep old versions of your data that can be recovered at a later time.

Do not back up obsidian!

This is general advice: Do not back up your obsidian vault individually. Instead, integrate it into your normal backup-strategy. This is easy on Windows and Linux but not so much on Android as Obsidian does not integrate with Android’s backup mechanism.

If you don’t have a backup strategy, read on and start it with your precious vault.

The golden rule of backups

This is the three-two-one strategy¹, meaning you should have three copies of your data, two of those on different media and on off-site. Again, syncing will help with this, but do not forget your history!

A two-step

Use the plugin

First of Obsidian does help you to back up your vaults. It has an integrated backup-plugin that should be enabled automatically after installing Obsidian. It is called file-recovery²

Got to Settings→Core plugins → File recovery and make sure that it is enabled. While you are at it, you might change its default settings to something more conservative than the default of 5 versions and 30 days retention.

At the time of writing, the file recovery plugin only saves .md and .canvas files. So you still need a main backup strategy.

And one last thing about the file-recovery plugin: To recover files, you need to go to Settings→Core plugins → File recovery again.

Have a real backup

As the file recovery plugin does not backup all your data, you still require a basic backup procedure. Unfortunately it is impossible to give specific advice for all computing environments Obsidian is running on in this little thread. But here are some pointers to working solutions:

• Backup and restore using Windows Backup
• Backblaze Cloud Backup for Windows and Mac.
• Duplicati for macOS, Windows and Linux.

If your data does not reside on a device with one of the classic operating systems, I’d like to hear about your (tested and working) backup and recovery solution for Android or iOS. I personally keep backups of all my data on an external harddrive, the backup starts automagically, whenever I plug it into my laptop, and off-site on backblaze.com using the restic backup software³. The retention periods are:

• 7 daily
• 4 weekly
• 12 monthly
• 10 yearly (local backup only)

#Obsidian #backup