Obsidian - Lets Talk About Backups

Obsidian vaults live on local hard drives, so a failed drive can wipe out years of TTRPG notes unless backups exist outside the machine. The core takeaway is to treat backups as true copies of the entire vault—stored on separate storage—rather than “sync” tools that mirror changes and can spread mistakes. For people who don’t want subscription-based backup services, a new plugin called Local Backup makes creating those emergency copies straightforward.

The transcript draws a clear line between backup and synchronization. Obsidian Sync is described as a way to replicate changes from one PC to another, meaning a bad edit could propagate to every connected device. Cloud drives like Google Drive and OneDrive are also framed as synchronization: they keep files updated, but they aren’t the same thing as an emergency snapshot you can restore from if something catastrophic happens. The goal is an off-to-the-side copy—an actual archive of the vault—so that if the computer dies (for example, a fried hard drive), the work can be recovered.

To solve that, the Local Backup plugin (by GC Chen) is installed via Obsidian’s Community Plugins browser. After enabling it, the setup focuses on where backups go, how many versions to keep, and how to package them. The plugin can run a backup once on startup, and it maintains a history length in days (how many backups to retain). Keeping too many backups can quickly consume disk space, especially for large vaults; the transcript uses a 10 GB vault as an example and recommends setting retention based on how frequently the vault changes.

A key configuration choice is the backup destination path. The plugin is set to write backups to a different drive (e.g., D drive “Obsidian backups”), not the same disk that holds the active vault. That separation matters because a single drive failure would otherwise destroy both the working data and the backup. Backup files are named using a template that includes the vault name and timestamp, making it easy to identify the most recent restore point.

For compression, the plugin can call an external zip tool. The transcript configures it to use 7-Zip (7z.exe) to create zipped vault archives, reducing size and producing a single restoreable file. A manual run is demonstrated, and the resulting archive can be opened in 7-Zip to confirm it’s complete.

Finally, the transcript goes beyond local-only protection by showing how to push backups into Google Drive. By pointing the Local Backup output to a Google Drive folder, the backup archive is created locally, then Google Drive handles the cloud synchronization. That yields a layered approach: a local copy on separate hardware plus an off-site cloud copy. The restore workflow is also spelled out: extract the backup archive to a folder and open it in Obsidian as a new vault, then allow Obsidian to re-index notes and re-enable bundled plugins.

The closing message is blunt: no matter which method is chosen, having at least one backup copy is essential. People in the Obsidian TTRPG community have reported losing everything after a computer failure; backups prevent that outcome.