Hi everyone, I’m having a bug currently in Obsidian that is giving me the error of “failed to open “““ for every file in my vault. I also typically use community plugins & have edited my theme, but the vault seems to have reverted back to having no plugins?
I’m not sure what has happened here. I use Sync and have it synced with my PC but am currently away from home, and all of these issues are happening with my Macbook. When I try to open the .rmd files in my files (not using Obsidian), it opens RStudio and then each file is completely blank.
What I’m trying to do
I’m trying to either restore all of my notes or fix this somehow so I can access them again.
Things I have tried
I have tried:
- Updating the installer (I have 1.12.7)
- Restarting Obsidian
- Redownloading Obsidian
- Restoring old versions of the files (nothing happens)
- Launching in restricted mode.
I read through a bunch of help forums and did not seem to find a solution for this.
My vault used to be saved through icloud, but I recently moved it to users/username/vaults as per Obsidian’s suggestion.
Thank you very very much in advance, this is super important to me & contains the last two years of my PhD, so, I really would like to get it fixed!
How recently? Was there a time where you were using both iCloud and Obsidian Sync at the same time? Did this issue perhaps begin while that was happening? Or can you verify that your work was intact after moving away from iCloud?
Is there any chance the Windows computer vault is stored in iCloud or OneDrive?
When you say “nothing happens” when you try to restore, can you be more specific? Are you seeing a history of blank snapshots? Or do you see the snapshot but restoring it fails?
Are you trying to restore via File Recovery core plugin, or Obsidian Sync? Have you tried both?
PHD work, please please tell me you kept some form of backups? 
Hopefully you can find a way to restore the work, but please, if you aren’t keeping backups, start doing so. Sync tools are not full proper backups.
In addition to what rigmarole asked,
Was the .rmd a mis-type? The files should be of the .md format.
I’m not familiar with RStudio, but I would try opening the files using TextEdit, VS Code, CotEditor, Sublime Text, etc. TextEdit is a default macOS app and can open plain text .md files. The others can be downloaded.
Luckily I have a backup on my PC! I’m away from home right now but was able to verify with my partner (having them log in) that my backup is there AND everything in Obsidian seems to be working fine on the PC, and those files are fine. But I need to be able to access the files on my laptop as well for when I am on campus, so, hoping to get this figured out.
There was a time I was using both iCloud & Obsidian Sync – this was for a few months when I first began syncing, and then more recently (probably ~3ish weeks ago?) I was messing with my Obsidian settings & saw the warning about iCloud, so I moved the vault to users/username/vaults. I did check iCloud, but did not find anything there.
When trying to restore I can see the snapshot of my notes (for all of them), but upon clicking restore I get the notification “this version is already the latest version”. And then I unfortunately still cannot open it, I get the fail to open ““ warning again. I am not sure which file recovery method this is… It is whatever method is done by right-clicking on the notes and going to “version history”. Apologies for not being more knowledgable on this! Thank you for your response.
You’re right in that I meant .md (.rmd is an RStudio document)! I attempted to open with TextEdit (I’ve seen some people get around this issue by adding line breaks in TextEdit) but I get the warning “the document could not be opened”. Thank you!
Depending how you moved it, and if your iCloud was not set to “keep downloaded”, it might be possible that you moved files while they were in a partially cloud-only state. I don’t exactly know.
Thank goodness you have a backup. Worst case scenario is zip up the vault and have your partner email the zip to you. Then you can deal with fixing the mismatch when you get home.