Back The Vault With Drive

How to back the vault with Google Drive

Note

Part of the Vault Storage & Presentation Design — Drive is the design's simple mode. Goal: Back up the Obsidian vault and sync it across your devices with Google Drive, with sync running in the background. Prereqs: Google Drive for Desktop installed and signed in; Obsidian on each device.

Warning

Drive sync is discouraged. It's fully supported, but git is the recommended backing (vault-git) — Drive gives up version history, off-device backup, and a safe chat-write path in exchange for effortless mobile sync. Prefer git unless seamless mobile is your priority. The full picture is in Drive's trade-offs below.

By default a vault lives only on the machine that created it — it isn't backed up, and it isn't synced anywhere. To back it up and reach it from your other devices, you enable one transport: Google Drive or git. This page is the Google Drive route.

Drive's appeal is effortless sync: drop the vault in your Drive folder and every signed-in device sees the changes, with nothing to run and smooth mobile access. The cost is that Drive keeps no real history, which is why git stays the recommendation — a short summary of what you trade is in Drive's trade-offs below.

Obsidian itself is a separate, optional add-on that sits on top of either a Drive- or git-backed vault — see Set up Obsidian on the vault. This page only sets up the Drive transport.

Prerequisites

• Google Drive for Desktop, installed and signed in, with a synced My Drive on each computer.
• Your vault folder (the directory holding the markdown).
• Optional: Obsidian on each device, if you want the Obsidian view (Set up Obsidian on the vault) — the vault syncs with or without it.

Steps

1. Find your synced Drive folder. On macOS, Drive for Desktop mounts it at:

   ~/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive-<your-account>/My Drive
   

   Confirm it exists and shows as synced in the Drive menu-bar app.

2. Move the vault into Drive. Move (don't copy) the vault folder somewhere inside My Drive:

   mv ~/path/to/Vault "$HOME/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive-<your-account>/My Drive/Obsidian/"

   Wait for the Drive app to report the folder fully uploaded before continuing.

3. Point agentm at the moved vault so the engine resolves the new location:

   python3 scripts/agentm_config.py --vault-path "$HOME/Library/CloudStorage/GoogleDrive-<your-account>/My Drive/Obsidian/Vault"

4. Confirm the search index stays out of Drive. agentm keeps the vector index device-local at ~/.agentm/memory/_meta/ (filename vec-index.db) — outside the vault, so Drive never syncs it and there is nothing to exclude. Verify it's there, not under My Drive:

   ls ~/.agentm/memory/_meta/    # the index lives here, on this machine only

5. (Optional) Open the vault in Obsidian on this computer: Open folder as vault → select the folder you moved into My Drive. Do this only if you use Obsidian (Set up Obsidian on the vault); the vault syncs regardless.

6. Add your other devices. On each other computer: install Drive for Desktop, sign in, and let My Drive finish syncing — that propagates the vault. On phones: install the Google Drive app to sync the folder. To read the vault on a device, open the synced folder in Obsidian (or any editor) — optional, per step 5.

7. Verify. Edit a note on one device; after the Drive app reports the change synced, confirm it appears on another device.

Drive's trade-offs (and keeping git alongside)

Why git is the recommendation. git gives per-commit history and rollback, an off-device backup that doesn't depend on Drive's trash window, and a safe chat-write path (propose-via-PR). Drive offers none of those: recovery is bounded by Drive's trash retention, concurrent edits land as (conflicted copy) files instead of merges, and chat connectors get read-only access. If any of those matter, use vault-git.

Keeping git alongside Drive — discouraged, but supported. The clean setup is one transport per folder. You can keep a git repo on the same folder, but Drive and git are two sync engines that don't know about each other, so a file edited through both between syncs produces a Drive (conflicted copy) and git conflict markers at once. If you keep both anyway, the one rule is to hold .git outside the synced tree so Drive never replicates it:

git init --separate-git-dir ~/.agentm/vault-git   # working tree stays in Drive; .git stays local

The simpler path is to pick one — stay on Drive (above), or move to git (vault-git).

Troubleshooting

Most Drive issues are a file that got synced and shouldn't have been. A cleanup helper (planned — not built yet) will handle them in one pass — run it yourself, or ask the agent to:

python3 scripts/vault_drive_cleanup.py --vault "<your vault path>"

It (a) lists each Drive (conflicted copy) sibling and removes it once you've merged, (b) removes any *.db / *.sqlite* index file that ended up inside the vault (the index belongs at ~/.agentm/memory/_meta/), and (c) confirms the vault is under My Drive and the index is not. Specific cases:

• (conflicted copy) files appear: a note was edited on two devices between syncs. Merge the two by hand, then let the helper delete the copy.
• Search or recall breaks after moving the vault: the vault path changed — re-run step 3 so agentm points at the Drive location.
• A device shows stale notes: Drive hasn't finished syncing — check the Drive app's status before assuming a problem.

Related

• Vault Storage & Presentation Design — where Drive sits as the design's simple mode, and the full reasoning for one transport per folder.
• vault-git — the recommended git-backed alternative: history, off-device backup, and a chat propose-via-PR path.
• Memory↔Storage Seam — why the search index is device-local (~/.agentm/memory/_meta/), so Drive never touches it.
• Installer CLI reference — the agentm_config.py config CLI used in step 3 (the --vault-path setter).