#1

I run on an old Mac that has taken to shutting itself down at odd times. When it did it last night I lost all of my daily notes (except for one which ended up in the trash) and all of my blank notes which I was using for place holders, as well as the folders for Daily Notes. It’s possible I lost more but don’t know what because of the nature of the notes.

Where could they have gone? Does Obsidian not want to keep empty notes? I am really confused because some of the files that were deleted ended up in the trash of my mac, but not all.

I would love to find these files again, but searching my computer yields nothing.

Other than making sure my back up is running (it was, but I’m afraid to put the files back and just have them deleted again with whatever new work I add), what can I do to prevent this in the future?

#2

Obsidian does not delete empty notes.

From your description, it’s really not clear what happened and who is at fault for deleting the notes.

Was it your filesystem that shudown inexepectetly and lost some data?
Maybe it was you who accidentally deleted the files.
Perhaps, you have some script or clould service, that moved the files under your nose?

If this happens again and\or you can figure out what happened and it is Obsidian’s fault we will look into it promptly.

#3

This would be the first instance of my computer losing data. The files were created at different times during the days I’ve been using Obsidian, some files that were created after some of those files that are still available (it deleted every single daily note file, which was over a week’s worth) which makes me think it wasn’t the filesystem shutting down, but I guess I don’t know. They were also in different folders.

No script is allowed to empty the trash, which means that anything a script touched would have left it in the trash file.

I don’t know how I could have moved files without knowing, and I haven’t emptied my trash in the last two days, so I know that isn’t it. I’m sorry if my request for help made me sound like I might miss that I had deleted something myself.

#4

This is quite odd indeed. This may have caused a file system corruption depending on how sudden these file shutdowns are.

I am happy to hear that you had backups. I’ll ask some other mac user in the team if they can think of something. I am sorry for your file loss but I am not sure exactly what happened here and\or if Obsidian is the problem.

#5

From your description, it doesn’t sound like Obsidian deleted the data - there’s only very few places where we actually “delete” files and they are all manual actions (right click -> delete).

Obsidian works basically like any other text editing tool, if you create an empty file, it saves an empty file.

I am really confused because some of the files that were deleted ended up in the trash of my mac, but not all.

That sounds like either the act of some other program, or MacOS itself. Is there any chance you have put your notes folder under some kind of temp folder that MacOS automatically cleans? Seems it’s a possible cause from this very old quora answer:
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-there-almost-always-a-Recovered-Files-folder-in-my-Trash-after-I-reboot

#6

Okay, so I’m not stupid enough to delete my own files and not realize it. I AM, however, stupid enough to label my folders with a dot at the beginning so they’ll show up first in an alphabetical list. I’d gotten so used to doing this in apps I’d forgotten it’s verboten in UNIX.

It would be great if there were a reminder before someone does this. Though maybe I’m the only one who’d be this dumb.

2 Likes
#7

Thanks, just labeled them with a dot. This is a good link to hold on to though. I get that call from my mom every few months.

1 Like
#8

Got it, thanks for reporting back!

1 Like
#9

I faced the same issue - empty folders have been deleted automatically after…
1.) Deleting files or…
2.) restarting obsidian

Solved: Extension Preferences → ”Consistent attachments and links” ->uncheck ”delete empty folders”

#10