I want to report this issue too. It happened to me on July 18th (last time the notes were edited), but I realized about it today. Some notes were completely replaced by the content of other notes, super weird . Fortunately I could recover those affected notes.
I want to provide a possible clue: the issue might be related with creating/changing backlinks fast in the frontmatter. Because thatās what I was doing. And I was working at super speed, with 2 Obsidian windows and multiple tabs opened (may be something with the ārefreshingā of the backlinks broke it, I donāt know).
Another thing is that the affected notes were in the same folder.
Iāve realized that sometimes when Iām creating new fields and assigning/changing values fast in the frontmatter, the values donāt get assigned (I have to re-enter them). I just mentioned this latter because it could be related.
Do you not have a general backup system setup, or is this just extra insurance? If you donāt, I recommend setting up Time Machine and checking Back up your Obsidian files - Obsidian Help for a friendly guide to other options.
Iām seeing this bug as well, using obsidian vault on a single machine but placing the vault in google drive to get a backup. On latest obsidian 1.9.12 Mac OS 15.7 Apple Silicon. Latest google drive as well (114.0.1.0). No community plugins.
Iāve noticed a few things on my system trying to find out whatās going on:
Affected file history in google drive shows several renames back and forth (A to B, B to A, which can explain how they are getting overwritten)
Affected files are highlighed in an inverse color scheme (e.g. white text on a black background in ls -G). Not 100% sure what ls is trying to indicate there but I think that means the file is āglobally writableā which makes sense if the OS thinks google drive created these files via the rename
I am not sure if this is an obsidian or google drive issue and I havenāt been able to reproduce it. Just noticed several random notes going missing from time to time. What I think Iāll do to mitigate this is schedule a copy via cron or similar once a day to google drive and keep the obsidian vault OFF google drive. I only need it on one machine anyway.
For the affected files ls -l does not show anything unusual (āmode 600ā in most cases) but xattr shows an additional attribute of ācom.google.drivefs.item-id#Sā which does in fact mean the file was created by google drive (ācreatedā via the renames I think).
Iāve used the same vault for many months with no problem. A few days ago I moved the vault to a very slow filestore - SMB to a cheap Azure Files share - and this problem has happened 3 times already. It makes me suspect thereās a race condition when a tab loads a new file, which only presents itself when the filestore is slow.
The outcome is that the content from the previous file gets written into the next one.
This is me entirely looking at it as a black box, and Iād be fascinated to peek around the source code, but it almost feels like either/or:
Edits to the new note can be made before itās been fully read in, so the edit buffer still has the contents from the previous noteā¦ Which it then writes back to the new one.
Thereās a write buffer being emptied from updates to the previous note, but because of the filestore delay it doesnāt finish before the tab changes to a different file. (feels unlikely unless thereās a hidden retry behaviour)
And to show how slow the filestore is - and therefore how unlikely this race condition is under normal circumstances - another symptom of the filestore delay is that the Properties pane takes a few seconds to open when the tab changes to a new file. In fact, if I rush editing and donāt wait for the Properties pane to appear, then the problem described seems to happen more often.
The OP mentioning iCloud makes me wonder if thatās similarly slow when there are updates and iCloud sync happening the background.
Iāll try to gather some better evidence and repro details; or maybe a video. In the meantime:
SYSTEM INFO:
Obsidian version: v1.10.6
Installer version: v1.5.12
Operating system: Windows 10 Pro 10.0.22631
Login status: not logged in
Language: en
Insider build toggle: off
Live preview: on
Base theme: adapt to system
Community theme: PLN v1.18.0
Snippets enabled: 3
Restricted mode: off
Plugins installed: 14
Plugins enabled: 7
1: Dataview v0.5.68
2: Templater v2.16.2
3: Update modified date v1.5.0
4: Tasks v7.22.0
5: Auto Note Mover v1.2.0
6: Iconize v2.14.7
7: Style Settings v1.0.9
By forcing links to open in a new tag (e.g. with obsidian://show-plugin?id=opener) the problem doesnāt manifest itself. Presumably this is because any async operations to finish writing changes to the previous file can still happen, while the new note loads into a completely fresh tab.
This has happened to me a few times now, most recent is today. According to Google search, this problem is at least 1 year old and I have only noticed it this month. Basically a certain portion of contens from one note are replaced with the complete contents of the previous note I clicked on. Itās Windows 11 and Obsidian 1.8.
Iām sort of scared about how many of my notes within this year have been replaced with the previous notes without my knowledge, particularly more so because Iām writing a book and all my thoughts were in those notes. I considered switching from Evernote to Obsidian as one of the best decisions and now Iām not so sure. Is there anyone actually solving this issue? Iām asking this because I like Obsidian and I can wait for a few days. But if no one is working on it, then we might have to switch to an alternative, as this problem will become more widely known to other users.
I agree, had the issue a couple of times last year, canāt reproduce since then but just wanted to add:
- it happened on Android
- was not using any sync plugin/alternative and it
- occurred while working with the frontmatter, as fast as possible, changing from one note to the other in the same tab (havenāt found a way to visualise multiple notes/tabs at the same time
. Fortunately I could recover those affected notes.