Obsidian Quartz sync

The process of porting my files from Obsidian vault has been a bit tricky. I initially thought of having my digital garden in my obsidian vault and maintaining it there but I couldn’t figure out a good organization where I could have both work together organically.

My personal vault is my second brain of sorts - I use it to track projects and tasks, plan and review my days (weeks, months), and maintain a personal wiki and thoughts/ideas. The problem was that I already have a structure for my vault that works well, but it intersperses personal files along with thoughts and wiki files. I couldn’t just put everything publicly as it has a lot of private information.

After a bit of a struggle, I decided the best approach is to continue using my personal vault as it is, and specifically mark the files that can be made public. Instead of doing everything in the same vault, I decided to copy the files that can be made public into another folder. This way, my personal vault is not touched and I can continue using it without modifications.

This adds a bit more work though, so I decided to automate everything. I added a few custom variables to the yaml header for the files I want to be in my digital garden:

• publish (boolean): decides if the file needs to be copied to my digitial garden vault.
• path (string): copies the file to a particular folder (and renames it if a filename is mentioned).
• assets (list of file links): a list of assets used by the markdown file; these will be moved to the digital garden as well.¹

Here is the Python script I use to copy files from my obsidian vault to my quartz folder:²

Code

And here is the configuration file I use along with the above python script:²

Code

Next steps:

• Python script to remove comments and sections that I don’t want to be public.
• A folder where only explicit regions will be added and nothing more (opposite of above feature).
• Add created and updated date tags (check discord threads)

Footnotes

1. I chose this approach instead of just going through the markdown and finding linked files, as this provides me with explicit control over which images are displayed and which are not. Sometimes I have snapshots of textbooks or video images in my notes and I don’t want to accidentally put them on the digital garden as it might cause some copyright issues. By adding this safeguard, I can make sure all the assets I add are open for sharing or are my original work. ↩

2. You can find the latest version here and here ↩ ↩²