How to eliminate git conflicts in Obsidian mobile — Pull strategy HARD reset
If you only read on mobile, two settings are all it takes to stop conflicts entirely
I opened Obsidian on my phone one morning and found <<<<<<< sitting right in the middle of a wiki file. Git conflict markers, planted smack in the body of a note. And I hadn’t edited anything on mobile.
When I looked into it, the cause was structural. My second wiki gets changes from three places at once. Claude Code sessions edit it from my local PC, Hermes runs digest jobs from the dev server, and obsidian-git on mobile was quietly making commits here and there with auto commit turned on. These three streams colliding was only a matter of time.
The fix was simple. If I’m not editing on mobile, I should just stop it from making commits altogether.
Go to Settings → Git plugin and change two things:
- Auto backup interval:
0(disabled) - Pull strategy:
HARD reset to latest commit
Turning off auto commit means mobile will no longer commit local changes. Switching pull strategy to HARD reset means the remote always wins, even if a conflict does occur. From the next sync onward, the conflicts disappear.
If you’re already in a conflicted state, open the command palette and run Git: HARD Reset, or if things are really messy, just delete the vault folder and re-clone. All your data is on GitHub so there’s nothing to lose — with one caveat. Deleting the vault folder also wipes the .git directory inside it. Make sure everything is pushed before you delete.
The re-clone itself can also fail. obsidian-git on mobile uses isomorphic-git, a JavaScript implementation rather than native git, and larger repos frequently throw a Packfile payload corrupted error. I got stuck on this for a while. In that case, syncing files directly with Syncthing or just reading from GitHub on the web tends to be more reliably stable in practice.
Once you’re clear that mobile is read-only, the settings naturally simplify to match.
Background: The second brain design story · Why I moved Hermes to Discord Deep dive: Connecting agents to the wiki