Obsidian on a work laptop you can't install anything on

One problem with Obsidian is that it is a local app at its core, with no web version; the notes live where you installed it. That can be a problem on a machine where you cannot easily install things, a work laptop being the usual example. There are a few interesting ways around it, though each one requires bending Obsidian out of shape, as one community member put it. It looks like putting floats on a car and using it as a boat.

• The best option is probably a Synology NAS if you'll work from the browser, since Obsidian Sync and Syncthing both need something installed locally.
• At first I thought a cheap remote server was a viable option. You'd still have to sort out security though, and as far as I understand it wouldn't be cheap, since the infrastructure needs a slightly more powerful setup.
• If the aim is mostly capture and lookup at work, Joplin's official web app may be enough. It runs in the browser with nothing installed, though the hosted version now syncs only with Joplin Cloud. To use your own Joplin Server, you'd host the web app yourself. Either way, it keeps a copy of your notes in that browser, on the work machine.

In my case I predominantly use my phone for capture anyway, so a remote desktop setup would not add much value. The main thing to understand is what exactly you are going to use the notes for in the circumstances where you cannot access them.

Yours, minus the boilerplate,
Zhenia