Syncing your vault

Your vault is just a folder of text, so syncing it across machines is whatever file-sync you already trust. There’s exactly one rule to remember.

The one rule

Sync <vault>/ only. Never sync ~/.prevail/.

~/.prevail/ contains Telegram bot tokens, OAuth refresh tokens, your MCP bearer token, and the session database. Those are machine-local secrets. Syncing them would copy your credentials to every device and into your sync provider’s storage.

Pick a mechanism

git

The most powerful option — you get versioned history of every decision.

cd ~/life-vault
git init
git add .
git commit -m "vault snapshot"
git remote add origin git@github.com:you/life-vault-private.git
git push -u origin main

Use a private repo. Your vault is your life. Commit on a cron or whenever you like; git log becomes a literal timeline of your thinking.

iCloud / Dropbox

Put the vault inside your synced folder and point Prevail at it:

mv ~/life-vault ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/life-vault
prevail init     # re-point the vault path

Sync is automatic and invisible. No conflict resolution beyond what the provider gives you.

Tailscale

Keep the vault on one machine (a Mac mini, say) as the source of truth and reach it from your laptop over your tailnet — for example via a symlink to a Tailscale-mounted path, so both machines read and write the same files with zero copy step.

Two-machine setups

A common pattern: a source-of-truth machine holds the real files, and a development/daily machine symlinks to them over Tailscale. Both read and write the same vault, so there’s nothing to reconcile. Prevail doesn’t care how the files got there — it just reads the folder you point it at.

The same applies to running the Telegram daemon: run it on the always-on machine that holds the vault, and it has everything it needs.

What not to commit

If you’re using git, your vault may accumulate things you don’t want in history. A starter .gitignore:

# never — these live in ~/.prevail, but guard against symlinks/copies
.prevail/
**/telegram.json
**/*.token

# large opaque docs you'd rather not version
**/00_current/*.pdf

Adjust to taste — some people want their PDFs versioned, some don’t.

Conflicts

Because everything is append-mostly markdown, conflicts are rare and human-readable when they happen. The _log/ files are per-day and append-only, which minimizes collisions even across machines. If two devices write the same state.md at once, you resolve it the way you’d resolve any text conflict — in your editor.