Help with Obsidian File Recovery snapshots

[LUNTK43]

Hi there,

I realize that I’ve posted a similar issue before, but it seems I haven’t quite learned my lesson:

Last night, I was editing some notes on my phone while in airplane mode, meaning I was working offline. This morning, when I went online again, all the changes I made overnight were overwritten. For context, I’m using Obsidian Sync.

Fortunately, I was able to recover most of my local changes from the file recovery section. However, there was one particular note where I had made a significant number of changes, which I intended to merge manually later on my PC (I had planned to compare the local phone version with the synced version).

But when I opened my PC, my phone indexed my vault, and suddenly, all the file recovery snapshots I had just seen moments before had vanished without a trace.

I understand that Sync isn’t designed to serve as a backup solution, but how is it possible that the file recovery snapshots I was scrolling through just minutes ago are now completely gone?
Is there any way to retrieve my changes, or any steps I can take to ensure my data isn’t lost like this in the future? (I haven’t edited these notes on any other device in the meantime, so I’m puzzled as to how Sync could overwrite my notes when no other changes were made except locally on my phone!)

Thank you so much for any help you can offer!

[CawlinTeffid]

I don’t know why this happened — you may want to email [email protected] to see if they can help you understand.

As for prevention, the obvious answer is to backup your files. Obsidian Help has a page about this now: Back up your Obsidian files - Obsidian Help

Unfortunately this is easier said than done on a mobile device. I rely on Sync copying my files to my laptop, where I have proper backups. (They are also included in my whole-device iCloud backups, but those only run once a day and I’d have to restore the whole device.) What you can do is manually copy your vault to another location on your phone. There are some backup options in community plugins; some require internet or don’t work on mobile, but maybe there’s one that can help.