Disable auto-save or change frequency

Feature requests
41

+1 for this.
Seems a bit extreme to have autosave run for each letter we type. (pretty much, it seems)

I know the following is not for everyone, but my “personal cloud” solution syncs these files on every save.
This makes it a hell of a workout for the local disk, the app, the network - and my NAS.

The sad part is that I finally feel like I found the perfect note-taking app, but this doesn’t sit right with me.

7 Likes
42

The default autosave gap is 2 seconds later while I stop writing.
I need to configure the autosave time gap. When I save the vault in Dropbox or Onedrive, I can setup my own sync frequency.

15 Likes
43

Very simply, for me having hundreds or thousands of versions for a longer note with many edits over time is way too much. I’d like to set my version history save frequency to something more like 10 minutes rather than having it save a new version every time I pause for two seconds.

When I want to recover a previous version, I’m going for “close enough,” not for a precise recovery at a specific clock time. Having a bigger gap will make the versions stored have a much higher rate of utility.

8 Likes
44

would love this! I was downloading pdfs into my obsidian directory and obsidian sync saved the chrome download files bc it synced it too fast :upside_down_face:

2 Likes
45

It’s also hammering SSD.

4 Likes
46

On Windows 11 with iCloud Drive, the default autosave frequency causes so many file issues and has lost me so much work, it is becoming unusable.

4 Likes
47

I really can’t understand why Autosave has to be on all the time and isn’t configurable.

External editors work with autosave switched off, using a manual save, and avoid the file issues and lost work. Why can’t Obsidian work the same way?

3 Likes
48

Just a bit of math to illustrate the point.

  • The life of SSD drive is counted in TBW - Terabytes Written.
  • TBW essentially tells you how much data you can write before the memory cells become unreliable.
  • Samsung 970 EVO is a very popular SSD drive that is highly valued for its quality. For 500GB version warranty is 300 TBW. For 1TB version it is 600 TBW. Basically every cell can be rewritten only 600 times.
  • Let’s imagine that we have a 50k character text file, which is quite common for me. Obsidian’s autosaves every time a new character is written. When writing a text there is a lot of back-and-forth, a lot of adding, deleting and changing. So really, when determining how many keyboard presses were done to get to the 50k characters, conservatively at least double (100k) is needed.
  • Using non-latin characters like Finnish, Cyrillic, or Chinese means that every character will take 2 or 4 bytes. Let’s assume it’s only 2 bytes per character. So 50k character file = 100kb.
  • But since we are not saving the full size every time, the file is linearly growing from zero, then we can assume that on average 50kb is being saved.
  • So 50kb * 100 000 (keyboard presses, so how many times the saving action is needed) = 5GB of writing data. Compare 100kb and 5GB, to save 100kb one needs to write 5GB of data, 50 000 times more…
  • 100 000 / 600 = 167. Meaning that the 100kb file that was handled by Obsidian killed the SSD cells 167 times more than the size of the file!
  • 7 000 such files (total size 7k * 100kb = 700MB, so less than one CD worth of data) would incur the writing cost of 7k * 5GB = 35 TB. So 35 TB / 600 = 58.3GB of used cells! Meaning that if a person has a mere 128GB SSD drive (not at all uncommon in laptops), Obsidian would kill half the cells of his SSD! It’s an absolutely insane cost!
4 Likes
49

These numbers are bonkers. If you think you can write character by character (and obsidian doesn’t save character by character btw) 7000 files each containing 50000 characters, you would have produced a text larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica https://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/08/business/44-million-words-strong-britannica-to-join-internet.html#:~:text=To%20organize%20more%20than%20300,%2C%20Calif.%2C%20software%20developer.
You will be worn out before your SSD.

More wear is done in one day and everyday to your SSD when you put your computer to sleep (ram is dumped to ssd to make sure that in case of power failure you can still resume).

1 Like
50

Same here. I would like Obsidian NOT to auto-save my work. I worked hours yesterday on a text on my iPad. When I opened the file today on my laptop, it hadn’t been updated yet. I closed it and when I came back later, both the iPad and laptop had replaced my new work with the older file version, as if the older laptop file was the most recent version. Had it not been for auto-save on the laptop, this would not have happened. I would like to save my work myself, I’m very used to that and have no need for auto save.

1 Like
51

I don’t see how auto-save is the problem if you didn’t change the laptop file. That sounds like a problem with the sync service.

1 Like
52

is there a final conclusion on whether well get a non auto save on obsidian?

2 Likes
53

This sounds like a “no” to me: Disable auto-save or change frequency - #35 by WhiteNoise

54

This is more likely to happen https://forum.obsidian.md/t/editor-add-a-toggle-to-disable-automatic-merging-of-changes-non-obsidian-sync/14874

1 Like
55

I am completely new to Obsidian and love the feature set. One thing that happened to me right out of the gate was file locking (presumably from auto-save and whatever is going on)…caused some folder sync software to fail.

I too, would appreciate a way to have auto-save turned off.

thanks.

2 Likes
56

cant we make it so obsidian uses the computers ram to make changes and observe the changes then when the user clicks on save is the only time itll write in hdd?

57

also this will slow down your work if your also using cryptomator or other things that encrypt your files

1 Like
58

Thanks for the idea, luckily this software available for all platforms, going to check it out!

59

I made an account specifically because I’m having issues with this. It’s producing too much CPU usage when used with Hugo like the other person above said. It really is the only glaring problem I have with Obsidian as a whole. If it weren’t for that, it would be the perfect notes app.

I’m a bit sad to find out there really isn’t a straightforward solution to the auto save problem. :slightly_frowning_face:

6 Likes
60

so was wondering if there is still hope to have the feature to disable auto save?

5 Likes