I was writing in a file and then saw a message that said: “Failed to save file.” Afterwards, I was unable to click out of my current file into any of the other files. I could click on the name of another file in the sidebar, but nothing happened.
I copied and pasted the current file, quit out of Obsidian and re-opened Obsidian. The copy + paste apparently did not take because the file did not save to my clipboard.
As a result, I have lost the contents on the file I was working on.
The Question
What can I do to prevent this moving forward? Specifically, what was the reason that Obsidian showed the “Failed to Save” message?
Additionally, is there anything I can do to recover the lost file?
This happened to me too the other day. Except for the copy-paste bit, which I did not try. I’ve only typed about 3 lines when the “Failed to save” message popped up, so there wasn’t much lost, and I moved on after the restart.
As far as I cal tell, there were no special circumstances, I was editing a note as usual. The note was in a vault on my iCloud drive. Oh… and I have probably used the insert template function slightly before it happened. I’m on macOS Big Sur and Obsidian version 0.13.19. Hope this helps track it down, it seems like a bug.
Thanks for your reply @Obsidandnancy! To clarify two points:
The problem might be related to iCloud, even though the OP did not specifically say it was on iCloud, that’s only my experience. FWIW the iCloud drive is a local machine folder, which gets asynchronously pushed to the cloud, so it should work like any other folder.
Both the OP and I ended up in a situation where Obsidian was unresponsive after the error popup, so clicking another note, hitting ⌘S (as I did), using ⌘C (as @Udon did) were completely ignored.
Even if the writing error happened outside of Obsidian, it should be handled more gracefully IMO.
I could not find a way to move this topic into the bug reports category, any help with that would be appreciated.