Obsidian Drive View

Mounting Google Drive as a virtual filesystem in Obsidian

Obsidian is fantastic because your notes are just plain files in a folder. On desktop, syncing that folder with Google Drive is trivial, but on mobile (especially iOS and Android) it quickly turns into a headache. Background folder-sync apps fight with mobile OS sandboxing, burn battery, suffer from sync conflicts, and force you to mirror your entire vault onto your phone's local storage.

I built Obsidian Drive View to solve this from the inside out: instead of syncing files on disk behind Obsidian's back, it mounts a Google Drive folder directly inside Obsidian as a virtual vault backend.

Replacing the Vault Adapter at Runtime

Under the hood, Obsidian interacts with the filesystem through an adapter interface at app.vault.adapter (FileSystemAdapter on Desktop, CapacitorAdapter on Mobile).

Rather than fighting the local filesystem, Drive View hot-swaps app.vault.adapter at runtime with a custom GoogleDriveDataAdapter:

app.vault.adapter (GoogleDriveDataAdapter)
 ├── .obsidian/*   ──► Native Adapter (FileSystemAdapter / CapacitorAdapter)
 └── Vault Files   ──► RAM + IndexedDB Cache ◄──► Google Drive v3 REST API
  1. Minimal Local Stub Folder: Your local vault directory only needs to hold .obsidian/ (plugin code, settings, and workspace state). Any reads or writes to .obsidian/* are transparently forwarded to Obsidian's native platform adapter.
  2. Virtual Vault Filesystem: Every note, folder, and attachment outside .obsidian/ lives in Google Drive and is served through an in-memory + IndexedDB cache.

Keeping Reads & Writes Instant

To keep the editor feeling completely native, writes update the in-memory tree and local IndexedDB cache immediately (<1ms) while rapid auto-saves coalesce into debounced uploads to the Google Drive v3 API in the background. Embedded images, audio, and PDFs are served directly from cache as in-memory blob: URLs without ever touching local disk, and remote edits from other devices are pulled incrementally via Drive's changes.list delta feed and reconciled live into open editors.