Back up Obsidian on Mac.

Why Obsidian is hard to back up

An Obsidian vault is a folder of Markdown plus the .obsidian/ config directory that lives at its root. The Markdown is trivial to back up. The .obsidian/ directory is where it gets interesting: community plugins, installed themes, hotkey maps, workspace.json with your open panes, graph.json with your graph view settings, and per-plugin data directories full of state. Back up only the Markdown and a restore gives you plain notes with no Dataview queries, no Tasks plugin, no templates. Back up the vault while Obsidian is running and the workspace file rewrites constantly, producing noisy snapshots.

How macup handles it

macup backs up the entire vault folder and treats .obsidian/ as a first-class part of it. Markdown files, .canvas files, attachments in your configured attachment folder, and the plugin and theme directories all ride together so a restored vault opens with the same plugins enabled, the same hotkeys bound, and the same community themes installed.

The workspace.json file rewrites every time you move a pane, so continuous backup debounces it. The trash directory at .obsidian/trash and the plugin sample vaults are excluded by default. Community plugins reinstalled from the community store would take minutes per plugin on a fresh vault, so capturing them in the backup turns a morning of fiddling back into a single restore.

Chunked deduplication handles the reality of how you actually write: small edits across many files. A day of linking notes and adjusting tags produces a snapshot measured in kilobytes. Everything is AES-256 encrypted on the Mac before upload; your vault passphrase wraps the keys and never touches the server.

Recommended policy

A backup set configured like this covers the important things and skips the regeneratable ones:

name: Obsidian vaults
include:
- ~/Documents/Obsidian
- ~/Documents/Obsidian/**/.obsidian
- ~/Documents/Obsidian/**/*.md
- ~/Documents/Obsidian/**/*.canvas
- ~/Library/Application Support/obsidian
exclude:
- "**/.obsidian/trash/**"
- "**/.obsidian/workspace-mobile.json"
- "**/.trash/**"
- "**/.DS_Store"
- "**/node_modules/**"
schedule:
mode: continuous
debounceSeconds: 15
quietHours: 02:00-05:00
destination: macup-cloud
retention:
daily: 60
weekly: 52
monthly: 120

Tune further in the macup dashboard per destination.

What you get back

A plugin update breaks Dataview across your vault. Open the dashboard, roll the vault back to yesterday’s snapshot, and the old plugin version, the old workspace layout, and the old template snippets all come back together. Or restore a single note from last month when you moved a paragraph you now want back.