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Keep your Obsidian vault in Nextcloud — and actually edit it

July 10, 2026

I’ve hosted my own Nextcloud ever since it dawned on me how many of my “private” notes were actually sitting on other people’s servers. Nextcloud shuttles my Markdown files between my machines reliably enough — the trouble was that the moment I wanted more than raw file-sync, a board over those notes, a proper database, I was back in some app that pulls my data into its own cloud. Closing that gap was one of the reasons I started Plainva: your vault stays in your Nextcloud, and you edit it in a real editor.

The setup is deliberately boring

In the sync settings, pick WebDAV, paste your Nextcloud address — the long one ending in /remote.php/dav/files/YOURNAME/ — use an app password instead of your real one, choose the folder with your vault, done. From there a local copy lives on your disk, you work fully offline, and Plainva quietly writes back once you’re online again. There’s no Plainva server in between, because there isn’t one at all.

You could just as well let the Nextcloud desktop client sync the folder and point Plainva at the local copy — that works. I still prefer going straight over WebDAV, because the client’s “online-only” placeholder files regularly trip up editors that expect real files on disk. (And if the mobile app that’s on my roadmap ever ships, the same WebDAV vault just carries over.)

The moment where it could go wrong

What I care about most is what happens when I edit the same note on two computers. Plainva doesn’t silently overwrite: it merges what it can, and when two edits genuinely collide on the same line, it keeps both and lets me decide. “Last write wins” just isn’t an answer I’ll accept for my own notes.

If you already run Nextcloud, Plainva turns it into a real home for your notes — a proper editor on top, and your files still just files.

— Marco