I’m using Obsidian sync, and 99% of the time it works great, but every once in a will it will create a duplicate of a file, presumably because there was some conflict in the file that it couldn’t resolve. That’s fine; I’d prefer that to a bad merge that might lose data.
But my problem is that these sync conflicts seem to happen silently, and I don’t notice them until I happen to run across “My note 1” in my vault, possibly weeks or months later. (I just did a search and found a few really old ones that I never knew about.) Then I cringe and diff the versions and try to understand which is newer and what changes I made, and hope that I didn’t somehow edit both versions of the file at different times; and clean up links — for some reason the links always point to the “1” version of the file, so I have to go back and change them all.
How do other folks deal with this? At a minimum, is there a way to know about conflicts when they happen? I was debating writing a plugin to tell me when these conflict files appear, but that seems overboard to fix a problem that the base product should probably already be addressing.
Well, now I’m flummoxed. I’m definitely not using another sync tool, and I have a very short list of plugins, none of which seem in any way related.
Maybe it’s not related to conflicts — in fact, some of the duplicated files were exactly the same, which makes it seem like a conflict is unlikely. Is there any other feature in Obsidian that might be duplicating files. It’s got to be something in Obsidian because it not only creates the new file but also updates all the links to point to it.
Doing a little digging into the sync history for some of the affected files, it looks like this tends to happen around when I rename a file. Obviously it doesn’t happen consistently, but maybe that’s a clue.
You can post your “Show Debug Info” and maybe someone can spot a suspicious plugin. And then we’ll also know key info like your OS and Obsidian installer version.
Are you sure you aren’t using another syncing tool? In MacOS some default folders automatically sync with iCloud. In Windows, some default folders automatically sync with OneDrive. When installing some cloud tools, they “helpfully” offer to backup other folders.
Perhaps. Again, the plugin list from “Show Debug Info” will help here.
SYSTEM INFO:
Obsidian version: v1.5.12
Installer version: v1.5.12
Operating system: Windows 10 Enterprise 10.0.22631
Login status: logged in
Catalyst license: insider
Insider build toggle: off
Live preview: on
Base theme: dark
Community theme: none
Snippets enabled: 2
Restricted mode: off
Plugins installed: 6
Plugins enabled: 5
1: Calendar v1.5.10
2: Timeline v1.1.0
3: Dataview v0.5.66
4: List Callouts v1.2.7
5: Ninja Cursor v0.0.13
RECOMMENDATIONS:
Custom theme and snippets: for cosmetic issues, please first try updating your theme and disabling your snippets. If still not fixed, please try to make the issue happen in the Sandbox Vault or disable community theme and snippets.
Community plugins: for bugs, please first try updating all your plugins to latest. If still not fixed, please try to make the issue happen in the Sandbox Vault or disable community plugins.
Did you carefully check your vault isn’t in a default OS path? Can you share the full path to your vault? (Hide your username or any sensitive info you don’t want to show.)
I’m on Windows, and I very intentionally made sure the vault wouldn’t be synced by anything else. I do use Dropbox and OneDrive, but obviously not on this path:
+1 on this issue for me. For years I’ve had perfect Obsidian sync performance for 10k+ files with iCloud and syncing across multiple OS devices (2x Macs, iPad, and iPhone).
However, today I was moving thousands of files into a new folder system and created this duplication issue. I’ve been overhauling my Vault structure for days now, and haven’t had any issues, because normally I’d watch the Sync log and wait for ‘Fully Synced’ status before I make major changes concurrently. But today, I got impatient and just kept on moving files and folders, and then switched Macbooks, too, while the syncing was underway. So I suspect all of that concurrent file movement on different Synced devices is the root cause for me.
My Challenge Now: I’m not concerned with Obsidian Sync, because I know it’s great, and today was an exception for my workflow. But now I have ~1,000 records that are duplicates. Is there a way to perform a Duplicate Check vault-wide?
The best way would be to restore a recent backup, or from a snapshot in version control like git.
What’s an example of a filename of a duplicated file? If it has something like “Copy” or a number appended to the filename, then maybe you can just search using Spotlight and find all the files that have that name/pattern.