I’m in the process of changing the filenames in my database to change my file structure. I’ve been at this for a week, and everything was going smoothly until today.
But this evening Obsidian started taking these new filenames and prepending them (including the filename extension) to the beginning of the actual file content, not only in the file I’m editing, but in some others. I’m not clear on how it’s deciding where to put them, but after I’ve done several of these, they’re also “stacking up.” (See screenshot.)
I’ve also found these filenames tucked into the middle of a few files so far, and it looks as though it’s replacing some characters, not just fitting in between them. (I’m not entirely sure, because it’s making a mess of the text.)
Here’s what it looks like then after I rename this file. To be clear, I’m not adding ANY of this stuff that comes before what should be the start of the metadata area.
I can list the plugins, but I have all the same plugins I had a week ago, and as far as I know it wasn’t doing this.
I’m not using anything special to change the filenames. I’m just manually going into the title area of the note and renaming it (then saving it into a different subfolder, because that’s how I’m keeping track of which ones I have and haven’t done).
Plugins:
Air Quotes
Better Word Count
Book Search
Copilot
Dataview
Note Refactor
Novel word count
Reading Time
Reset Font Size
Tag Wrangler
Timeline (not being used in these notes, btw.)
yTranscript
Oh, and yes the notes exist. All of these are notes I’ve renamed this evening. (These are the new names.)
Hmm. I am. (That’s what a quote block that displays “quote” at the beginning is, right?) The behavior I’m seeing doesn’t seem to match what’s described in the linked thread, though.
This particular file, for instance (that I screenshot above) doesn’t have anything extra showing up in the main “body” of the note – just at the beginning before what should be metadata. (Which is not showing up as metadata because this extra text is messing up the dashes that set off the metadata area.)
If that’s the issue, is there a fix for it? I can’t just delete every callout in my database.
When you say, “then saving it into a different subfolder”, how specifically? Dragging? Move command? It’s not about special or anything, just knowing so we can try to narrow down what’s going on.
The glitch links are in Markdown format, not wikilink format. Is that the setting you have for all your links?
It’s hard to say, but maybe something changed in a recent update. If Obsidian updates, a plugin might slightly change its behaviour. Or maybe it’s a new bug. Or that callout bug.
I would try turning off all plugins temporarily to test. Does it stop happening? Then try updating all your plugins. I’d especially test ones related to modifying your notes or doing automatic things. (Copilot, Note Refactor for examples.)
I’m making all my changes from within the note editor: change the title in the title field, then use the three-dots drop-down menu and select “move to.”
No, the glitch links don’t look like my other links. Most of them are pretty standard wikilinks. The fact that this is insertng them that way is a whole other layer of weirdness.
I encountered exactly the same problem today (within 24 hours of your post). I am using no community plugins. I do use callouts.
This is the first time Obsidian has misbehaved for me. The fact it’s corrupting the text of notes is very concerning. I found that it had deleted about 30 words in one note.
I agree; that’s concerning. There are all manner of potential glitches that are weird or annoying, but mostly they’re tolerable. Deleting the note content is a real problem. And 30 words is a lot! The most mine seem to have lost (that I’ve noticed so far) is one brief phrase. And fortunately it’s from a book that I own so it’s not too difficult to put right. But not everything is so easily replaced.
I did update all of my plugins (which it hadn’t occurred to me don’t update when the app does), and I haven’t seen the issue again yet, but it’s kind of a hit-or-miss issue to begin with and I don’t have a clear idea of what the pattern is.
In the meantime, you might want to consider turning your File Recovery settings up a bit. (I use 3 minutes interval.) And make a backup of your vault if you haven’t already (always a good idea).
Are you willing to share here or DM me a file that has callouts where I can try to reproduce this happening? Do you have a note where you know this will happen? Does the glitch happen when renaming or when moving? Or only after you’ve done both?
Any other clues you can give? Do all the notes where this happens have both a callout AND frontmatter? Does it happen consistently, or is it difficult to reproduce? Do the glitched notes always have aliases defined?
Are you syncing in any way? Obsidian Sync, iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc.
I have reproduced the issue. It’s nothing to do with relative paths or using Markdown links.
My current settings for Files and links:
Automatically update internal links: ON
New link format: Shortest path when possible
Use [[Wikilinks]]: ON
SYSTEM INFO:
Obsidian version: v1.6.3
Installer version: v1.4.13
Operating system: Darwin Kernel Version 23.5.0: Wed May 1 20:16:51 PDT 2024; root:xnu-10063.121.3~5/RELEASE_ARM64_T8103 23.5.0
Login status: not logged in
Insider build toggle: off
Live preview: on
Base theme: light
Community theme: none
Snippets enabled: 1
Restricted mode: on
I am not syncing in any way (no cloud sync services on my system) .
To reproduce issue:
Choose a subfolder inside the vault
Create a subfolder ‘Test Topic’
Create three notes within the ‘Test Topic subfolder’: Test topic.md, Test topic note 1.md, Test topic note 2.md
Add text content to all three notes
Add a callout in Test topic 1, in which a link to ‘Test topic.md’ appears as a bullet
Add a line of text below the callout
In the Obsidian file browser, select the ‘Test Topic’ folder and right click. Select ‘Move folder to’ and choose the root of the vault ''
Open Test topic 1.md and find that 13 characters of text below the call-out box has been overwritten with ‘’
Furthermore…
Moving the ‘Test topic’ subfolder back to its original subfolder changes the text again. This time it becomes ‘c.md)’
On previous occasions, I have found that the notes are prepended with spurious text, just as the OP noted.
If you please, thanks! DM them if you prefer not to share here. If you can, I’ll try to reproduce it today. Otherwise I’ll try to follow your steps tomorrow when I have some free time.
Just one other thing. Installer version: v1.4.13 is a pretty old installer at this point. And you might want to try downloading and reinstalling from a more recent installer. I’m not sure what the last mandatory manual update was. (It might actually have been 1.4.13.)
Sad to say that I’ve found numerous corruptions among my collection of 3000+ notes. I can recover them from Time Machine backups but only if I know which ones are affected. That means reading every one.
I’m done with Obsidian and will be using Typora to manually maintain my Markdown files from now on.
The one thing a note-taking app must never, ever do is corrupt notes.
I have found that in some files the spurious text overwrites text at the bottom of notes. Sometimes it overwrites text in the middle of a note. Sometimes it prepends text to the note.
