Empty Notes after running Obsidian Sync in Mobile App

Bug reports
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1

Hello,

I am using Obsidian and Obsidian Sync since December. I have successfully migrated all my notes from Notion. After a while, I noticed that a few of my notes are empty (the files have 0 bytes in size). Firstly, I thought that I made some mistake or that it is an issue with some community plugin, but then I realized that is not the case.

I cannot fully reproduce the issue, but it is still occasionally happening, and I was able to track it down a bit.

It is happening every time I move or rename dozens of individual notes or just rename a folder with dozens of notes. The desktop app works fine, but the mobile app will happily overwrite some of the notes by uploading the same file with 0 bytes in size instead of downloading the file from the Obsidian Sync server.

Steps to reproduce

I am 100% sure that if I rename my “notes” folder with ~500 notes to “notes2” in my Obsidian desktop app and then open the Obsidian app on my Android phone, a few of the notes (~5) will be empty.

Expected result

Obsidian sync will properly sync my notes across multiple devices.

Actual result

Obsidian sync in mobile app randomly upload the same note with 0 bytes in size instead of downloading the note from Obsidian sync server.

Environment

Obsidian desktop app: v1.7.7 on my Arch Linux
Obsidian mobile app: v1.7.7 on my Android 13, Samsung S20+

The same happened on my Samsung Tab S7 without any community plugins.

Additional information

Please see the screenshot – the “upload complete” files are causing the issue. I did not make any changes on my mobile device, and the Obsidian app was closed (and killed). It should download the changed/moved notes instead of uploading empty files back.

obsidian-mobile-sync
obsidian-mobile-sync1080×2400 202 KB

Now, I am running find . -type f -empty every day in my Obsidian folder to see if there are any empty notes to prevent losing data.

2

I don’t think obsidian overwrites your notes with empty version.
What is more likely to have happened is that you moved a directory, which means multiple files are deleted and recreated somewhere else. Between the deletion and recreation, you clicked on a link and that action created an empty note with that title.

3

“Moved a directory, which means multiple files are deleted and recreated somewhere else.”
– That is correct.

“Between the deletion and recreation, you clicked on a link …”
– That is not true.

Let me rephrase it again:

  • I moved a directory in Obsidian Desktop and waited for sync to catch up → no issues here.
  • I opened the Obsidian mobile app and just swiped to pop up the sync log → waited for ~2 minutes as a lot of files had been downloaded again, and in the end, a few of them were overwritten by uploading the same file name in the same directory (the new one) but with 0 bytes in size. These files had never been opened in my Obsidian mobile app before.

What is your suggestion for providing you with more information?