Chose wrong file to open as vault in Dropbox and now it won't close and I can't use Obsidian unless I create a new vault

[sandychick92]

What I’m trying to do

Select the vault (which I keep on Dropbox) that I use on another computer in order to use it in a second computer so I can add notes from either computer and have them all be there.

The problem I have is that I selected the .obsidian file within the vault folder and now no matter what I do, the ‘vault’ won’t close on the second computer. This happened because I wasn’t sure what file/folder I was supposed to select and due to delayed syncing my notes weren’t appearing on the vault folder so I thought I had to select a specific file and not just the folder.

If I try to create a new vault I can, but the one where I selected the .obsidian file doesn’t close and I can’t select the Dropbox folder with the original vault to open. Below is a screenshot of what it shows

Things I have tried

• Uninstalling and re-installing Obsidian several times
• Restarting my computer after every time I uninstalled Obsidian before installing it again
• Manually erasing every file containing the word Obsidian from my computer. I did a general drive search since only deleting the files on C:\Users.…\AppData\Local\Obsidian didn’t work.

Please help since I genuinely don’t know how to solve this. I have only used Obsidian a couple of times

[ariehen]

With Obsidian closed on all devices, you can rename the main Obsidian vault folder using Windows File Explorer. For example, if your vault name is Obsidian Vault, rename it to Obsidian-Vault (or whatever).

Next you want to make sure GoogleDrive isn’t removing that folder or any of its contents from your PC and making it cloud only. Make sure the Obsidian-Vault folder (or whatever you’ve renamed your vault) is set to mirroring and not streaming. Details here. If your vault folder in GoogleDrive is set to streaming, this can cause issues when using Obsidian.

When Obsidian is re-opened, it won’t know where the vault is (because you renamed it), so the vault switcher, Manage vaults…, should open. From here you can choose Open folder as vault and pick the correct renamed folder.

Wait a bit for GoogleDrive to sync to the second PC, set the folder to mirroring, and Open folder as vault again.

Hopefully that helps a bit.