I have Obsidian Sync enabled on several devices (2 Mac, iPhone, iPad), all of them set to sync all settings / plugins, including the hotkeys file.
Today I opened Obsidian on Macbook Pro and noticed my hotkeys are gone. In “settings version history” when I click “hotkeys.json” I see “this file was deleted” last week, and recreated as an empty file. No earlier file history; no trace of my custom hotkeys.
Preface, sync issue last week…
This may be related to moving my synced vault folder out of Dropbox last week, a screwy experience that required some manual fixing:
I’d been getting frequent conflicting copies and realized it might have to do w/ using both Dropbox + Obsidian Sync on multiple computers. Without much thinking I tried moving my vault folder out of Dropbox to a local directory…
- Copied vault folder from Dropbox to local Documents folder
- Then deleted that vault folder from Dropbox
- And re-enabled sync in the new local vault location
- Expected: I assumed I’d just have to reconnect the (now-deleted) vault on my other devices
- Actual behavior: it seems the old vault folder got recreated from my other computer, still in Dropbox, and sync propagated that vault — now empty — across devices (incl the new local folder I’d reconnected to Sync).
To fix this, I manually restored from the folder I’d deleted from Dropbox (from Mac Trash), and after that, things seemed to sync normally.
Back to today…
I noticed the missing hotkeys settings file, and the last date in version history I think is when the above happened, so I’m wondering if some artifact of that process left things in a corrupted state somehow…
The weird thing is that was 6 days ago and I’ve used Obsidian on this same computer more recently, with my custom hotkeys working! When I restored a week ago, I got all the settings and hotkeys back working again. So I’m not sure if something else happened today…I think my Macbook restarted after a minor OS update, but idk why I’m just now seeing no version history (other than deleted file) for the hotkeys file.
Annoyingly the “sync log” is only showing activity from today, so I can’t check what may have happened between now and last week. (Does reconnecting Sync reset this history, or is it just short?)
Additional information
- Operating system: Mac OS 10.15.7 (this computer, others on OS11 and latest iOS/iPadOS)
- Obsidian version: 0.12.15 (both computers), 1.0.4 (iOS)
Sorry I don’t have any clear repro on this, mainly just documenting / sharing in case anyone else has run into a similar issue. I know this is complex and I may have inadvertently screwed something up!
For now I (again) restored my hotkeys.json file from a backup I luckily kept in Dropbox, and that seems to be working.
Just a little nervous that something’s still wonky and I don’t know how to diagnose if there may be any lingering issues w/ Sync.