My Obsidian vault lives on my NAS now, and every device sees the same notes without a subscription

Published Aug 28, 2026, 7:30 AM EDT Richard is the PC Hardware Lead at XDA and has been covering the technology industry for almost two decades. He's been building PCs since young, and when not creating content, you can often find him inside a chassis somewhere. I love using Obsidian. This very article was written up using Obsidian notes and then an initial draft, making the app central to both my work and leisure. But like most productivity apps, even ones as feature-rich as Obsidian, struggle when it comes to using them on multiple devices. Synchronization is available via Obsidian's developer as a cloud-based subscription, but I wanted something I managed myself for free. Turns out, it's incredibly simple and takes a few minutes to get up and running. Transforming Obsidian from being fully local Creating a comprehensive cloud-backed productivity suite Obsidian has some excellent apps available for all platforms. Be it Linux, Android, iOS, or Windows. There's an app for every platform. The cleanest and easiest way to get Obsidian in the local cloud is to simply self-host the app. This provides a web-based Obsidian instance with centralized vaults. It's a good solution, but it requires devices to be always connected, and there are times I prefer to work offline, be it in a coffee shop or on a long-haul flight. That's where Obsidian Sync comes into play. This premium service, offered by the Obsidian developer, allows one to synchronize vaults across devices. The standard plan allows for one vault and 1 GB of total storage to be stored externally for synchronization across platforms, while Sync Plus bumps this to 10 and 10 GB, respectively. That's not terrible and a great way for anyone to support future development and take advantage of interconnected installations, but there's another way. Obsidian has some fantastic community-made plugins, and LiveSync is a fine example. This handy plugin can leverage an already-configured home server setup that runs 24/7. I have precisely the platform LiveSync can call home, allowing me to self-host my own Obsidian Sync of sorts. It allows each client to have a local Obsidian vault, which can then be synchronized to a remotely hosted CouchDB instance running on my server, acting as the sync backend. Livesync simply keeps all the local vaults aligned, allowing the apps to behave like local-first installations, but with the ability to sync when required. The best part? You don't need to have a comprehensive self-hosted empire running in a home lab setting. Most NAS enclosures will be able to do the job just fine, so long as Docker containers can be installed. Offering the best of all worlds To keep things simple, creating an SMB share on a NAS may seem like the best way forward. It's easy; the NAS is already storing data, and there's no downtime. It sounds like the best way forward. But what if you want to use Obsidian on your phone? How about a second PC? That's where issues can arise with connectivity and multiple clients all accessing the same hosted vault(s). If one connection drops mid-transfer, you'll risk corrupting one of the hosted vaults on the share. If you load a previous version of a file and it automatically saves it to the NAS, you're out of luck there too. That's why LiveSync was the obvious choice forward. It's a full vault on each client with the ability to sync changes elsewhere quickly, supports offline, and even reconciles some conflicts, which can appear when multiple clients all share a centralized database. For Obsidian and connecting multiple clients together, it's all about ensuring synchronization progresses smoothly. LiveSync is essentially a synchronization plugin that can use CouchDB, S3 object storage, or even WebRTC to store vaults. For NAS and self-hosted Proxmox platforms, CouchDB is usually the way to go, or has been in my experience. Every client runs through LiveSync, which determines which changes to apply via HTTPS to the CouchDB (or other DB configuration) instance on a NAS or server. If I make changes to a note on my PC, it'll sync to my phone and vice versa. If I take my laptop to a coffee shop and work on some notes, it'll sync everything as soon as I get back. Simpler conflicts can be resolved automatically through merging and the like. For each client, it's still running a local instance. There's nothing changing with how things are saved. The same vault folders are used on each platform. LiveSync simply takes the data entered and decides what to synchronize to the backend. CouchDB brings everything together A compact, lightweight database inside a container All that's required to get LiveSync up and running is a running CouchDB instance. This can be a one-run script for Proxmox nodes or a package download from a NAS storefront. Using Docker, CouchDB can be installed in a few moments. The only thing to bear in mind is to create strong credentials, implement a restart policy so it always comes back online after reboot or power loss, and create an HTTPS endpoint for devices if accessing stored data outside the home network. If you're interested in opening up CouchDB to the internet, I highly recommend VPN tunneling or reverse proxies. I use the latter with Nginx, Cloudflare, and Unbound. Getting LiveSync set up on each client is straightforward too. All that's required is the LiveSync plugin to be installed from Obsidian's community repository, point the plugin to the CouchDB (using an internal IP or public-facing domain), configure the database, make the first added vault as the initial source of truth, and you're good to go. I then added the rest of my devices and everything just started synchronizing without human intervention. I now had my own Obsidian Sync. A setup URI can be used to automatically bring everything into the fold, and it works flawlessly. What's surprising to me is how local it still feels. I don't realize I'm connected to a DB hosted at home. Every Obsidian acts as it would without any internet access. One thing to note with this setup is it shouldn't be considered a backup. I don't count it as my 3-2-1 backup strategy. The entire DB is backed up, as are individual vaults. That's one drawback to using LiveSync over something like iCloud.