Destination file already exists

Help
1

What I’m trying to do

There doesn’t seem to be a good forum answer for this problem. I cannot rename a file.

Things I have tried

I rename it to something different, but I cannot go back to previous names. In other words the file rename allows you to add, but not subtract back to something previously saved. I cannot believe this is an OS problem. It seems more like an obsidian issue with titles being links.

I don’t seem to be the only one with this problem, and I can’t find a solution in the Help forum.

2

“Destination file already exists” means the file exists and the filename cannot be chosen, so you would have add another character to it.
We would need to see what you are renaming to what, as this can be an OS problem if you for instance are trying to rename ‘abc’ to ‘ABC’. Then in a case like this, you could rename abc to ‘abc22’ (wait for Obsidian to refresh its index on backlinks), then that to ‘ABC’ again, in a two-step measure.

3

Like @Yurcee says it would be nice to know which filename you want to rename to and from. If you’re in the process of trying to rename a file related to upper- or lowercase characters, many file system require an intermediate rename in there. I’ve sometimes seen this error message to such an operation.

In other words, if you want to rename from OBSidian to obsIDIAN, you need to go from OBSidian to something like TMP_obsidian, and then from TMP_obsidian to obsIDIAN.

4

It won’t let me. It will let me add a letter or number or space when I rename, but if I rename back to one of the previous, regardless of capitalization, I get the same error message.

All I wanted to do was capitalize ‘notes 02.’
I’ve managed to change it to ‘Notes 02 b,’ but I can’t erase either the b or the spaces.

5

That’s weird. I tried to reproduce your issue and create a note called notes 2. I then renamed it to Notes 2 without a problem. I linked another file to notes 2 before renaming, to check if there might be an issue with links. But the renaming back and forth worked without a problem.
Are you sure that you do not have already an existing file with the same name that you are trying to rename your file to?

6

And you did try renaming to another name all together, and then back to your other case?

If you’ve got dataview installed, try the following query, and see what it returns:

```dataview
TABLE file.name, file.folder
WHERE startswith(lower(file.name), "notes 02")
```

Or if you have way to many, try an exact match with:

```dataview
TABLE file.name, file.folder
WHERE lower(file.name) =  "notes 02"
```

Do use only lowercase characters in any of these queries, to truly detect those having the same name.

7

If you do not have dataview installed, you can also “just” use the the build-in search and type in file:notes 02 or file:"notes 02"