Data loss!

[ryanjamurphy]

@terryjbenzie

paid community

Obsidian offers some donation options that give users access to Insider builds of Obsidian (earlier access to features) and Discord channels to discuss those builds. There’s also a “VIP” level donation tier that has a special Discord channel. But none of those are offered as a paid support community—that’s available for free, and you’re in it! (More info about Obsidian’s catalyst program can be found on the website: Pricing - Obsidian)

Community plugins, however, are primarily supported by the developers that make them. Considering you’ve found a reproducible bug and the fix is turning off Periodic Notes, you may want to report that as an Issue on the plugin’s official page (its GitHub repository): GitHub - liamcain/obsidian-periodic-notes: Create/manage your daily, weekly, and monthly notes in Obsidian

Either way, glad you’ve made progress!

[ryanjamurphy]

Another follow-up. Someone on Discord was having this problem and figured it out.

Basically, you’re hitting the Open Daily Note command before Obsidian Sync has had a chance to reconcile and sync down all of the changes.

As a result, your local vault doesn’t have the cloud version of the daily note file, and it thinks it needs to create a new one. Then when Sync finally gets to the daily note file, it sees that there’s a more recent version of the file, and uses that new (blank) one instead.

So the solution is just to wait for a bit when you launch Obsidian for the first time in a day. How long to wait depends on how many other changes your device needs to sync down, but ~30s should be robust.

Further context from Licat (one of the developers):

Merging only happens to an existing file - it’s a 3-way merge where you’ve made some changes to the file locally, and some changes were also made remotely. When that happens, we take the diff you made locally and apply it onto the remote version. In this case there’s 3 different versions of the file involved: Old version of the file, New version of the file locally, New version of the file remotely.

When you “create” two different files on both sides before it syncs, there’s no “before” state to compute a diff to apply on another. You can’t do a 3-way merge because there’s only 2 versions.

In that case, previously we still tried to do a 3-way merge but we considered the “old version” to be an empty file. This causes the diffing algorithm to just consider the whole file “inserted text” and append that to the end of the other version, creating a file with one version appended to the other