Documentation about the Re-Indexing Problem of Obsidian

Is there an Article for this Problem?

Been struggling for a long time with the weird behaviour of Obsidian re-indexing the complete Vault on Windows 10. Just annoys the heck out of me.

Cant find something about it really, just unanswered and closed Posts…

@the mods: i dont want to bug report as a volunteer worker… just want to know if there is a bug-article. please, can you help with this simple thing?

Copying my replies from Discord:

To my knowledge there is no single article collecting reasons for re-indexing problems, it varies greatly depending on the OS, plugins, etc etc etc. As we recommended in Discord, please follow the steps in the debug help thread to rule out things. That’s literally THE article that rules out common problems.

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Volunteer here.

Sometimes it happened to me, too in ways I couldn’t explain…

I did many full vault search and replace jobs and it was inevitable, of course.
But if I closed Obsidian too early. Next time I opened the program, it started indexing again.
It is possible that some plugin (do you have DataView, Omnisearch or some other plugin that also does indexing on startup?) hijacks the resources or gets entangled, I do not know. It’s quirky.

It is generally a good idea not to force-close Obsidian (is it possible you are low on RAM or something?) and spend time in the vault and then exit. Then fingers crossed for next launch.

Also, start with a clean slate.
Copy all your plugins to another folder and start with a clean no-community-plugin vault to find the possible culprit (if there is one – I do not know).

Then do this:

  1. Quit Obsidian.

  2. Navigate to the following location:

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\obsidian

Delete these folders:

Cache
Code Cache
DawnCache
GPUCache
IndexedDB
Storage

  1. Restart Obsidian

It will reindex your vault for real. Then work in your vault for a while. Close Obsidian. Open Obsidian. If all is well now, close Obsidian again. One by one, copy back the plugins into the vault (.obsidian folder > plugins). Enable the plugins in Obsidian.

It sounds like a lot of work, but one needs to get in the practice is all.

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You should be a mod and be paid. Thank you, but I already knew that procedure, except for the folder-part. I feel sad for you putting in thoughts, time and energy for nothing.

Being soaked into an ecosystem with all the 3rd Party plugins (which are ADVERTISED), and then left alone by the team if something happens. “Third Party Plugin, nothing we can do”, yeah, quite canny of yours, make a Bug List, thats what you can do. And also then stop promoting the plugins.

If you are experiencing a bug with a plugin, report it in the GitHub repository of said plugin. That’s the only way the third party developers can fix it. Neither the volunteers nor the obsidian team can keep track of all the bugs for all the plugins, let alone taking into account the variations in OS, sync methods, etc. that we’ve mentioned before.

I am reimbursed for my time here by my ability to use the fantastic free app and by the people who can give insights on all the things I don’t know (there are tons). In an ideal world, the help goes around.

On a different note, try Linux as well, like e.g. the Ubuntu distro (use the debian package if you are on X11). Windows with all the virus and malware checks, and bloatware is harder and harder to tolerate.

  • I’ll keep the last line as well, even if some people don’t like me for it.
3 Likes

Weird, i can do it, and i am just an amateur, i have a list for Bugs i encounter on my things, and this list is working for me. Yes my system has many apps, and i also use different OS. I am just one person. And i am not even giving that a lot of time.

The difference is scale. You’re one person, not ~100k users (assuming only discord users, and ignoring for simplicity those that only visit the forum), all with their particular configurations; that times ~1200 plugins, again each with their particular configurations… and you can see where I’m going with this, it’s unrealistic to expect the team or the moderators to maintain a list of bugs that accounts for all those possible variations.

In any case, your question has been asked an answered and I don’t believe going in circles about this is productive for anyone, so I’ll close the thread. If you need further assistance, use GitHub for the third party plugins or open another help thread with a new question.

1 Like