Empty Folders Disappear When Reopening Obsidian

Help
1

Hopefully this is not a duplicate, I did search for a previous topic.

What I’m trying to do

When I create an empty folder in my vault and then close Obsidian, when I re-open, the folder is not displayed in the vault - however, the folder is on the file system.

Things I have tried

If I add a file in the folder via Windows Explorer, the folder immediately appears in Obsidian - and if I then remove that file via Windows Explorer, the folder immediately disappears.

I tested the “empty folder” / close / re-open on a new vault (test-vault), this does not occur. As well, as Sync is configured on the vault with the issue, I configured Sync on the test-vault and the empty folder on the test-vault did not disappear after closing / re-opening Obsidian.

I did compare the options between the two vaults and didn’t see any enabled/disabled option differences that would appear to cause this issue.

I turned off (but did not uninstall) community plugins - empty folder still disappears.

I looked through all the JSON files in .obsidian, and there were no options that would appear to cause this issue.

Thanks for any help you can provide!

2
  • When you turn off a plugin, make sure to restart Obsidian to ensure that the plugins unloaded completely.
  • Try to disable any custom CSS snippets or themes. It might just be a CSS snippet hiding the folders.
  • Make sure to update your plugins and themes to the latest versions too.
  • If your Obsidian installer is getting old, you might have to manually update by downloading and reinstalling. (But this likely isn’t it, since your test vault was ok.)

That’s all I can think of for the moment.

3

Thanks for the tips.

Disabled plugins, restarted, created empty folder, restarted - folder doesn’t display.

Disabled tag CSS, restarted - same.

Plugins and app are kept up to date.

What’s interesting, if I create an empty folder and leave it named “untitled”, restart and it is missing in Obsidian - but if I try to create another new folder (which starts as “untitled”), Obsidian complains that the folder already exists. So it sees it in the file system, it’s just not displaying it.

Will keep plugging away at it. I’ll just have to start with an empty vault and start applying small # of changes at a time, restart, add a folder and restart again, and see when it disappears.

Thanks again.

4

And your community theme too. Did you test that?

5

OH, good call - I did not remember the theme…but after disabling community plugins, CSS and theme (back to default), the issue persists.

Thanks!

6

Well that is odd. The only idea I have left is, where do you store your vault?

Is it in some kind of a cloud/sync tool, or NAS/network-drive that might be managing your empty folders in some way? (I doubt it, but that is my last guess for now.)