Yeah I thought it maybe a bug, but was not sure. I have a old back up of my vault I have to look into, but I’ve made so many changes it takes time.
But my note was relatively short, nothing like what you said. You should definitely made couple of back ups for the kinds of effort you are talking about.
Yeah, that was the big mistake. The file was locally stored so I thought they will be fine. I learned this the hard way.
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Hope you can still recover it tho.
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Well, I can recommend only R-Studio, but it isn’t free and not sure about demo. But you can try to check free/freemium analogs on alternativeto.net
It’s very hard to say what is going on.
The file is likely empty because it was deleted at some point and now you clicked on a link and recreated it empty.
Is it possible that you renamed or moved this file?
Aside if this a problem with Obsidian or not (it would be great to have reproduceble steps), you really need to have some form of backup in place for your important sfuff.
You can try recurva as suggested.
You can also look at .trash/ in your vault and the system recycle bin.
How did you open it in this moment? Please describe exactly what you did.
Other important things for us to know are which Obsidian version and which installer are you using (you can take a screenshot in Settings > About)
I am sure I have not done anything from my side to the file. The first time it happened I thought maybe it was my mistake, so I was very precautions about it. Last time it happened to the same file, maybe it was some problem with a particular file or some problem with huge number of latex equations.
Mostly It contained small notes linked with it and those are safe, so I can reproduce my work again but it will take extra time.
But I have created a backup now.
Every night I work on this subject. Last night I added some notes and embedded some small notes to it. After that I opened today and it was blank.
The file was empty but I was able to scroll for a while as if content were there or probably blank spaces. But when I opened edit pane it was like any new file.
Is it possible that this file is hard to render for some reason and it wasn’t actually empty (at least initially)?
I suggest to grab a fresh copy of obsidian from the website and reinstall it.
Good on keep backups.
Most of my files take some time to render because they are filled with mathematical equations, but normal text in the file appears quickly. When I saw the file empty I checked it in the original location and its size was 0kb, so the file was actually empty.
I tried a few of the recovery software but they are not very helpful in this situation. I think backup is the only way to be safe.
Sorry I’m late for a reply here. There isn’t much I can add, but I’ll summarize:
- On Windows, I’d recommend Recuva with deep scan mode on the entire drive you stored your notes on. There’s a chance you can get the file back partially or fully, but if you work on a primary drive like
C:it’s also quite likely that your file has been overwritten by logs and temp files generated by the OS. - Your notes are all local, while that’s all great for data security “nobody can steal it”, it’s unfortunately not any protection against data integrity.
- Even if Obsidian works perfectly, there’s always a chance something else (sync solution, text editor, other tools, hard drive corruption, laptop gets stolen) causes data loss. Accidents can also happen when one didn’t get enough coffee.
- Make sure you backup your notes - it doesn’t have to be sophisticated. Anything is better than nothing. Just making a copy of the folder, or creating a zip gives you a good start.
- Be especially careful if you’re going to use community plugins. While most of them are safe to use, there may be edge cases the plugin author isn’t aware of that could happen to cause data loss for your setup.
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Continuing to explore causes here.
I mean, specifically, how did you open it? The quick open? A link? Do you have any idea as to whether it contained data before you opened it, or if it was mysteriously deleted sometime between the edit the day before and when you tried to open it?
What other apps/services interact with these files?
Did you have have the plugin “Extended MathJax” enabled and added some code the file “preamble.sty” before this happen?
This happen to me after I input the code to install additional package through preamble.sty.
The code was wrong and it messed with obsidian so i tried ctrl+r. Obsidian took much longer to load.
When obsidian done loading, the file would be empty (i checked the OS explorer, the file also show 0kb)
This problem happen 3-4 time that day until i delete that line of code from preamble.sty
I used obsidian app pinned to the taskbar, and then selected the file.
I think it contained data before I opened it because when I opened it I saw that the scroll bar became short as if notes were loading, in the preview pane.
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