How to Sync an Obsidian Vault With Google Drive

2026-08-28·5 min read

People switch to Obsidian and then hit the same question: my notes live on my laptop, so how do I get them into Google Drive, or in front of someone who works in Google Docs? The answer starts with understanding what an Obsidian note actually is.

Your vault is just a folder

An Obsidian vault is not a database or a proprietary file format. It is a plain folder on your disk. Every note is a .md text file you could open in any editor. Images and PDFs you drop in are saved as ordinary files next to your notes. The only Obsidian-specific piece is a hidden .obsidian folder that stores your settings and plugins.

This is the whole reason Obsidian is portable. There is no export step, because the files were never locked up in the first place. Copy the folder to another machine and you have your entire vault. If Obsidian disappeared tomorrow, your notes would still open in any text editor.

It also means one practical thing: syncing your vault is the same problem as syncing any folder. Whatever keeps a folder in step across machines will keep your vault in step.

Putting a vault on Google Drive

Google Drive for desktop

The simplest approach is Google Drive for desktop. Add your vault folder to the set of folders Drive mirrors, and it uploads changes as you save them. For a single-machine backup, this is fine.

A few things to watch:

  • Drive syncs files as-is. A .md file lands in Drive as a .md file. You cannot open it as a Google Doc and comment on it. It is just a text file sitting in Drive.
  • Editing on two machines at once produces conflict copies. If your laptop and desktop both save the same note before Drive catches up, you get a second file with a conflict suffix, and you merge them by hand. The hidden .obsidian folder is a common trigger, because plugins write to it constantly.
  • Mobile is the weak spot. The Drive app on your phone does not hand those files to Obsidian mobile in a way that just works, so a phone usually needs extra tooling.

A community sync plugin

Several community plugins back a vault up to cloud storage. If you want your vault on Drive and you are comfortable configuring a plugin, this is an option. Check the plugin's current list of supported backends before you commit, since they change often, and test a throwaway vault first.

Obsidian Sync

Obsidian's own paid Sync service is the least-fuss way to keep a vault matched across your own devices, phone included. It does not use Google Drive; it is Obsidian's own storage. Worth knowing it exists, but it is a different thing from "my notes in Drive."

The gap all of these leave

Every option above treats your note as a file to copy. None of them turn it into something the rest of your team can work in. If you write in Obsidian and someone asks you to drop a note into a Google Doc so they can comment, you are back to copy-paste and manual reformatting.

That is the specific problem md2gd solves. It keeps a Markdown note and a real Google Doc in sync both ways. You keep writing in Obsidian. Your reviewer opens a normal Google Doc, leaves edits, and those edits come back to your Markdown. It stays a real Doc, not a .md file parked in Drive, so sharing and commenting work the way people already expect. There is also a CLI, so if an agent is generating notes in Markdown, it can create and update the Doc directly.

To sync an entire vault, one shell command links every Markdown note to its own Google Doc:

find ~/MyVault -name '*.md' -exec md2gd add {} --create \;

That walks the whole vault, subfolders included, and creates a linked Doc for each note. Edits then flow both ways. For a single note, run md2gd add "Meeting Notes.md" --create, or use --pick to link a Doc that already exists.

A few limits to be upfront about: images are not supported yet, the Google Docs to Markdown direction runs on about a one minute delay, and there is a cap of ten syncs per account for now.

Which one to pick

If you just want a backup of your vault, Drive for desktop or a sync plugin does the job. If you want your own notes on all your devices, Obsidian Sync is the least fuss. If the point is to get an Obsidian note in front of people who live in Google Docs without losing your Markdown, that is where two-way sync earns its keep.