Questions (and their answers) that we get often in our Discord server follow.
This is a live screen.garden note! We'll continue to add new Q&As as we get them.
Is screen.garden a backup service?
No. We highly recommend regularly backing up your vault. This is true whether or not you use screen.garden—it's just a good idea!
Are my shared notes safe?
All connections to screen.garden servers are encrypted, and all notes in our servers are encrypted at rest. Only collaborators have app and web access to your note—unless you share a note publicly, of course. You may optionally require a publicly-shared note to require a password so that you can share notes with specific people who don't have screen.garden (or Obsidian).
Be aware that notes in screen.garden are not end-to-end encrypted, as doing so would preclude reading and editing those notes on the web. If you’re interested in a more traditional end-to-end sync service, screen.garden is probably not for you.
Can I use iCloud/Obsidian Sync/OneDrive/some other sync solution alongside screen.garden?
If use the screen.garden plugin on multiple machines it will handle keeping shared notes in sync across those machines for you. If you also use a sync service, you should be careful to exclude shared notes from being synced by that service: otherwise your shared notes may become corrupted as screen.garden attempts to sync changes that have already been copied over. This is a problem when combining any two services that sync notes, not just screen.garden; however, we're actively looking at ways to make this less configuration-dependent.
Will web editing support my favorite Obsidian editor feature?
At present, editing notes in the screen.garden web interface is purposefully quite simple. While we want to add new features over time, we plan to do so deliberately and in ways that avoid clashing with other editors. The goal is to enable easy editing in situations where you may not have access to another option, and not to replace Obsidian (or other future supported systems).
Can I use screen.garden in Roam, Logseq, and other PKM systems?
We'd love to support these apps someday—the long-term vision of screen.garden is to enable collaboration across PKM systems. We started with Obsidian because our team uses it personally and is familiar with it.
What happens if I edit a shared note's file on disk, outside Obsidian? Will it still sync?
screen.garden supports sending updates to notes on your filesystem made outside of Obsidian, but there are a few extra considerations when doing so. First, due to the nature of screen.garden being an Obsidian plugin, we can only "see" those updates if Obsidian is open. Second, if you're editing a note simultaneously with another collaborator you may risk overwriting their changes, as your external editor may not receive their updates and you could save over them. We recommend trying to limit collaboration to inside Obsidian for these reasons.
Given these limitations, we currently recommend making changes directly in Obsidian or the screen.garden web editor if at all possible. If not, have the file you are editing open in Obsidian while you work so that changes are recorded.
I want to share a note that embeds an image. Will the image also be shared?
At present, embedded images (as well as wikilinked and transcluded notes) are not automatically shared alongside their notes. This is largely for security; while we're interested in more holistic sharing, it would be easy to otherwise "leak" files you intend to be private. If you'd like to embed an image in a shared note for others to see we recommend hosting the image outside your notes and linking to it, e.g. with imgur.
Are there any limits on the number or size of the notes I share?
During our beta period we have placed a few limits to prevent bad actors. We made these limits as generous as possible—it shouldn’t be easy to run into them. They are:
- Each user is limited to 50 shared notes
- Each shared note is limited to 50 collaborators
- Each shared note may not be larger than 1 MB
Can I invite my friends to screen.garden during the waitlist period?
Yes! Each person let in from the waitlist gets three invites they can use to collaborate with friends. To invite someone, add them as a collaborator to a note using their email address. If they are not already a screen.garden user (and if you have invites remaining), they will receive an invite to screen.garden, bypassing the waitlist.
Collaborator invites to existing screen.garden users do not count against your three screen.garden invites.