Editor: Add a toggle to disable automatic merging of changes (non-obsidian sync)

I’m having the same issue on build 0.13.19.

Of the commonly sited plug-ins that may be related to the bug, I DO NOT have the Day Planner plug-in installed, but do have Daily Notes and Calendar. I am sync’ing via iCloud between iPad and Windows 10. I also have directory structure and Files settings in such a way the Obsidian and Logseq can sync with each other.

The bug still persists on the PC despite me having Logseq closed and Obsidian on iPad closed. However, on the iPad, there appears to be no bug.

This suggests that the bug occurs under varying conditions, and, in my case, syncing via iCloud may trigger.

I’ve been having the same problem since I started using Obsidian. My main machine is Windows and syncing through icloud with my macbook, iphone and ipad. Every few characters, I experience the text getting deleted. It’s being incredibly annoying and I feel unproductive because I can’t focus on typing at all but I have to spend time checking what has been deleted.

I ended up using Mark Text as my markdown editor for now but if I have to keep doing that, I don’t see why using Obsidian at all.

I’d be happy with having the autosave turned off on a switch because this seems to be the issue here. It sucks because otherwise I love Obsidian but at the moment it’s unusable for me.

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Man, this is so annoying, It’s a shame this isn’t fixed until now. I’m giving up on obsidian. If this bug is fixed I’ll happily use it again.

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Has anyone found a solution for this?

  • turn off all synch?
  • only use Obsidian Synch?
  • use a particular synch option e.g. Dropbox

I’m currently using icloud and the deletion of words as it is ‘externally modified’ is driving me nuts! From the threads though I don’t really know what to do about it!?

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Just want to make a note here that even with Obsidian 0.13.30 with the new Electron 16 engine, I am still getting these “external changes have been merged” alerts despite never using anything except Obsidian to edit my vault. And NO I am not using iCloud.

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It has been happening to me with 0.14.6. I shall be turning off some plugins to see if that helps, though I doubt it will, to judge from what I have just read above.

This is the most frustrating and shocking bug for such a polished piece of software. It’s a shame because I fell in love with it instantly and this issue almost made me quit completely. Like it or not, the issue definitely exists as multiple people including me have it.

I hope they figure out how to solve this because typing something and then suddenly losing a sentence without any heads up is a unfathomable to me.

For now I suppose I’ll just be using a local vault without sync.

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Dropping in to say that pCloud and SynologyDrive both have the same problem with random merges. I guess a good fix would be have an option to choose autosave intervals.

Current workaround - using another editor (MacDown for me) - which is upsetting precisely for the reason that Pancake gave above.

Better conflict resolution is on the short term roadmap:

I suppose the merging is necessary to eventually enable shared vaults, but I personally also would prefer a sync conflict choice instead of auto merging.

This has now been moved to the long-term bin :frowning:
I have moved to using github for my notes syncing but this comes with its own set of annoyances.

:frowning_face:

That card in the roadmap is related to improvements to Obsidian Sync. It has nothing to do with this FR.

Came here to +1 the frustration everyone else is feeling. It makes Obsidian pretty much unusable.

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Hi Stefanie,
Thank you for sharing this information.

I experienced the same issue with the auto-merge notification.
The issue has gone away since I disabled the ‘Day Planner’ plug-in.

As an alternative, I use ‘Big Calendar’ plug-in to summarise the tasks created in daily notes.

I hope others would find this post useful.

Cheers.

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I’m still seeing this problem a lot (posted first about it a year ago).
I’ve learned to live with it. When I type and words disappear I click CTRL+Z to undo and continue. When I see the …(1).md files in the file explorer and delete them. I make sure I don’t have any empty notes so when I do see an empty note I can use file recovery to fix it (happens rarely).
I got a new ipad and can now do a lot more work on that without issue. The new features are great.

I have some ideas about the merging issue:

  • it would be great if Obsidian can compare the two notes prior to merging. For example, when I add text at the end of a note on my desktop and a conflict is detected it should detect that the version from iCloud is contained within the version of the desktop (has a few words less). In that case don’t merge the notes, just ignore the conflict.
  • has anyone been able to kill the iCloud sync on windows and prevent an auto restart? If we had control over when iCloud syncs we could let it sync every 30 minutes or so and prevent a lot of conflicts.

I blocked iCloudDrive.exe in Windows Defender Firewall which will stop any kind of syncing. When you want to sync just change the rule from “block” to “allow” again and syncing will continue.

I’m testing this now to see if it’s a good workaround …

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Lately I have been experiencing this issue on my Win 10 installation. Since I have used it less and resort to working on my iPad (non-iCloud install). I had learned to quit Obsidian when I was using batch search+replace with software like Notepad++ or Sublime Text.

P.S.:
My issue is not sync-related. I was thinking what could be causing this but because it happens on iPad as well, it is not an outside influence.

Hey guys. I am a rather new user to Obsidian and I’ve also run into the multiple file creation and the merging problems. I am using iCloud sync because I have a Win10 machine (work related) and several Apple products (Mac, iPad, iPhone) and I wanted to have my notes syncronized across all my devices. At first, I though that might be a problem for me but as I can see on this forum it’s quite a huge problem. Without going into details, because other persons in this thread already detailed the problems, I want to say that Obsidian is, in my opinion, one of the best note taking app but also has MAJOR problems regarding the auto-merge/auto-save options. I hope that the developers aknowledge this and implement the neccesary changes as soon as possible.