Git-Backed E-Ink Notes vs Obsidian Sync: When the Tablet Refuses to Be a Client

I wanted the e-ink tablet to be a client of the vault, the way the phone is a client of the vault. Open the folder. Write. Sync. Go outside. That is how Obsidian Sync sells the life. It is also how a lot of git-backed vaults work on a laptop: the folder is real, the remote is boring, the editor is whoever you opened.

The tablet does not want to be that client. It wants to be a notebook with a cloud. It will export a PDF. It will offer a proprietary sync. It will, if you are lucky, expose a folder of PNGs that look like pages and behave like attachments. It will not sit inside your .obsidian directory and merge a daily note the way the desktop app does. Treating it as a third Obsidian install is how you get conflict copies, empty pages, and a stylus that feels faster than your backup strategy.

Git-backed notes and Obsidian Sync are both fine vaults. The tablet is the problem. The honest design is: the tablet is a capture device, the vault is the system of record, and something you control — git, Syncthing, a script, a human USB session — is the bridge. The broader architecture is e-ink notes to Obsidian: do not make the tablet a third vault client. If the bridge is “the vendor app is a sync client,” you will lose a week to a product manager in another country.

What Obsidian Sync is good at

Obsidian Sync is good at Obsidian. Vaults on two laptops and a phone stay close. End-to-end encryption is a real checkbox if you trust the model. Conflict handling is less violent than a Dropbox folder full of Note 1 (Conflicted Copy). For people who live in markdown and rarely leave the official clients, paying for Sync is cheaper than maintaining a forge.

It is not good at devices that are not Obsidian. The e-ink tablet does not run the desktop app. A few Android e-ink machines can install Obsidian. That sounds like the answer until you use it: refresh rates, keyboard chrome, plugin hunger, a battery that thought it was a Kindle. I have done it on a Boox. I stopped because the tablet became a slow phone and I still had to babysit plugins that assume a backlight and a CPU.

Closed notebooks — reMarkable, Supernote in its more opinionated moods, Kindle Scribe — will not be Obsidian. They will give you an export. Sync is then a story about files, not about a live vault. Paying for Obsidian Sync does not make those files merge. It makes the vault on the devices that are Obsidian more consistent while the tablet remains a tourist.

What a git-backed vault is good at

Git is good at text you meant to be text. Daily notes, meeting bullets, links. It is honest about history. It is hostile to huge PNGs of handwriting unless you also adopt Git LFS or you accept a repo that clones like a photo dump. That hostility is useful. It tells you that the page image is not a first-class note. It is evidence.

I like git when the laptop is the editor and the remote is a box I own or a forge I already pay for. I can read a diff. I can revert the day I pasted a secret. I can sync to a phone with Working Copy or a similar client if I am careful. None of that requires Obsidian’s servers. All of it requires that the interesting object is a file git understands.

Handwriting is not that file. OCR can become that file. Vendor markup can become that file if you convert it. Until then, git-backed “notes” from an e-ink tablet are either giant binaries or a markdown sidecar you typed later. Both are valid. Only one feels like the tablet joined the vault.

How the tablet refuses

The refusal is usually one of three shapes.

First, no filesystem you can mount. The device syncs to a vendor cloud. You download a ZIP or use their desktop helper. There is no folder that Obsidian can open while you write on the train. You are doing import, not client sync.

Second, a filesystem that is almost right. Android e-ink, a USB folder, maybe Syncthing if the vendor did not break background sync. You point Obsidian at a subset and immediately fight: the tablet writes a PNG per page, Obsidian wants markdown, two programs touch the same directory, and one of them does not know what a conflict is. Syncthing will happily duplicate a page. Git will refuse to merge a binary and leave you in a detached mood at 11 p.m.

Third, an official “export to markdown” that is a one-way dump. Good for archive. Bad for a two-way client. You edit the markdown on the laptop, the tablet never sees it, you write a new page that OCR’s into a second file with a new name. The vault grows ghosts.

Obsidian Sync does not fix any of those. Git does not fix any of those. They fix the vault among computers. The tablet still needs a pipeline: pull pages off, turn them into something the vault can live with, never pretend the stylus is a third peer.

The pipeline that stopped lying

I treat the tablet as a camera for thoughts. Capture on e-ink. Once a day, or twice a week if I am honest, I pull pages to a inbox/eink/ folder that is not the daily-note folder. If I am on git, those binaries sit behind LFS or they sit outside the repo in an object store and the vault only keeps a markdown card with a link and a date. If I am on Obsidian Sync, I still do not put 40 megabytes of page images in the synced vault unless I enjoy quota mail.

Then I write a short markdown note: what the pages were about, a few links, maybe an OCR pass if the vendor’s text is good enough to search. The markdown is the citizen. The PNG is the scan. I can search the citizen. I can open the scan when I need the drawing.

People hate this because it is not automatic. Automatic is how I lost a week of margins to a sync client that uploaded an empty notebook after a factory reset. A slightly manual inbox is a feature. The tablet can refuse to be a client and I can refuse to be surprised.

When Obsidian Sync still wins

If your e-ink device runs Obsidian well enough that you actually write markdown on it — a rare Boox week, a phone-sized reader you use as a second screen — Sync is the least clever path. Pay, enable, do not invent git on a device that will sleep in the middle of a push.

If you never put binaries in the vault and you only use the tablet to read markdown you wrote elsewhere, Sync plus a read-only copy can work. Some people sideload a folder of exported notes for review. That is a reader, not a client. Fine.

If you already pay for Sync and your handwriting lives in the vendor cloud forever, stop trying to unify. Let the tablet be a vendor notebook. Let Obsidian be the thinking tool. Link them with dates and titles, not with a fantasy folder.

When git still wins

Git wins when the vault is already a repo, when you want history you can clone onto a new machine without a vendor account, and when you are willing to keep heavy page images out of the default push. It wins when two humans edit markdown and you already know how to merge. It loses when you thought git add . on a tablet export folder was a workflow.

I do not run git on the tablet. I run git on the machine that does the import. The tablet has no business seeing .git. If an Android device can see the vault folder, I hide .git and I still do not commit from the tablet. One writer of history. Many writers of notes, if they are markdown. One camera.

The decision

Obsidian Sync is a product for Obsidian peers. Git is a product for text and discipline. An e-ink tablet is a notebook that sometimes speaks files. If you need the notebook to be a peer, buy a device that runs the editor and accept the battery hit — or accept that you will be disappointed.

If you need the notebook to feed a vault you will still have in five years, pick git or Sync for the vault on its own merits, then build a one-way or mostly-one-way bridge. Share credentials with yourself, not with a vendor sync that thinks a page is a document and a vault is a bucket.

I also stopped using the vendor desktop app as a silent daemon. Those helpers love to rewrite a local folder while git has the same folder open. If I need their exporter, I run it into a staging directory and copy what I want. Two programs with different ideas of “sync” on one path is how empty notebooks travel.

The tablet will refuse to be a client. Believe it the first time. Design the inbox. Leave the live merge to machines that know what a line of markdown is. Your notes will be uglier for a week and safer for a decade.