Choose “Open Folder as Vault” and select a folder that Obsidian doesn’t like by accident. Then open the correct folder with your text files and enjoy Obsidian. Finally, quit Obsidian. Time passes. Launch Obsidian and error window pops up:
An error occurred while loading Obsidian. Error: EPERM: operation not permitted, watch ‘C:\Users[my user]\Documents\My Pictures’
Open Obsidian, and each time you open Obsidian, this same error pops-up. Six months pass, and you’re tired of this stupid error. Uninstall and reinstall Obsidian… Go to forums; Read troubleshooting…Post to forums.
I have done this before–opened a folder Obsidian doesn’t like–and the error eventually went away. This time I’ve had it for six months and reinstall doesn’t fix.
I found a few other posts with this error, but no steps to solve. Each time the error fixed itself.
In the vault switcher, do you still see the “mistake” vault? Have you tried to click on the 3 dots beside the vault and “Remove from list”?
Reinstalling Obsidian won’t necessarily flush those settings. Some settings are in your vault. App settings are stored separately under these directories:
Obsidian also stores some information in the system directory. This is different per Operating System; on macOS it’s /Users/yourusername/Library/Application Support/obsidian, on Windows %APPDATA%\Obsidian\, and $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/Obsidian/ or ~/.config/Obsidian/ on Linux. As a result, we recommend against creating a vault in this directory.
“Have you tried to click on the 3 dots beside the vault and “Remove from list”?”
That’s good to know.
I don’t see the “Pictures” subdirectory, but I can see the parent directory “Documents”, and I get an error: “Can’t remove a currently open vault”
“Obsidian also stores some information in the system directory.”
I found the app folder in, C:\Users\[my user]\AppData\Local\Obsidian, but I don’t see anything obvious (IE. My Vault List…).
What are these configuration files or their parent directory called–so I can search for it?
“As a result, we recommend against creating a vault in this directory.”
I’m not sure if you are referring to whatever location where I put my Vault such that it fracked up or in the settings directory [for me Windowsfolder AppData].
For what its worth, I wasn’t creating a new Vault. Rather, I was opening up a folder as a Vault. I have a subdirectory of Documents where I keep notes as TXT files, and I wanted convert one of these into a Vault, and accidentally opened up Photos.
SOLVED. I gave it another go today. I opened another Vault from the error screen. I noticed this gives me two instance of Obsidian in the Windows Task Bar. I quit the failing instance of Obsidian, and then was able to remove the Documents Vault from the list.
