I have posted on Discord and searched the forum with no hits.
What I’m trying to do
I have been an Obsidian user for months with no issue. I have recently encountered a situation:
Every two minutes or so, Obsidian creates a conflicted copy of my document (that I am editing).
What this means is that mid-sentence all my recently added text disappears, and I have to Undo to get it back.
Meanwhile, under the sheets, Obsidian is storing copy after copy of my document as a conflict on the file system, which adds up to a lot of cleanup and waste.
I have been, but it is now turned off, as are all community and most core plugins. Safety of data comes first.
At some point when I have more time, I will create a test vault where the stakes are lower and experiment with turning one thing on after another until the issue pops up again, but I can’t stop what I am doing for this now.
In the end it is all just markdown files. I can use many editors to keep my flow going.
The drive the vault is on could be failing. Unlikely given that it is a 6-month-old NVME drive, but it makes sense in terms of “things that could go wrong in less than obvious ways that could surface novel behavior”.
I don’t have an objection to it, but again. I have work that needs to get done. I will create a test vault and associated documents to the end of reproducing and documenting the issue, but it isn’t a priority vs everything else I have going on.
The earliest I’m anticipating finding that time is mid-week so, by the end of the week I should know more.
The great thing about markdown and local-first, is I can just drop Dendron, or any editor on top of the files and get my stuff done. It is great when the system works.
It doesn’t occur on a schedule, so a video is probably not in the offing.
It just occurred this morning and created the artifact below:
The same effect:
I had been writing for about 50 minutes. No issue. Something occurred at 5:44 to cause the conflict. The only other consideration is that I was typing in the Obsidian interface in a new note. Typically, I create a new note, then flip out to an external editor to do the bulk of the work. In this case, I had done this for the 48 out of that initial 50 minutes.
Clarifying observations:
I noticed a pop-up notification in Obsidian that noted that the conflict was detected and that the conflict copy of the document had been made.
The conflict occurs roughly every two minutes when editing in the Obsidian editor
The conflict does not occur at all when editing in an external editor.
While I get the focus on Sync, I am not using it. I never have used Obsidian’s, I disabled Nextcloud, and I don’t use any cloud drives. Local first means local first.
I was looking through the plugins and noticed ‘File Recovery’. I am wondering if this is touching the files somehow. Does anyone understand its function? In its function does it ever write to a file or timestamp a file, or perform any action on a file that might generate the conflict?
I had the community plugin: Backlinks in document enabled. I noticed today, when troubleshooting another occurrence of the conflict issue that the backlinks in the document were being refreshed with every keystroke. This expressed itself with a very rapid repainting of that section of the doc. Since it is occurring at every keystroke, it is quite distracting.
I mention it here only because it was not occurring before, and now is. Something does seem to have occurred to destabilize my instance of Obsidian. Or it means nothing and I just never noticed it.
Actions taken:
Community plugin: Backlinks in Document disabled.
Upgraded to release 12.5
This can be closed. I have removed Nextcloud, and the issue, from my workflow.
The issue seems to have been related to locking errors on the Nextcloud side. I may reopen and try to get it to work, but it requires either a complete reinstallation of NC, which is pretty disruptive, or a complete reinstallation of NC in addition to the installation of another app to manage the locking better.
