Indicator for status of saving

Use case or problem

There is no indication of whether all files were saved . Large amount of content can be imported, parent system can be overloaded or straight up incredibly slow itself, power can go off and leave user guessing whether anything was lost, and etc .

Proposed solution

Single icon which:

  • Switches to represent processing, when any changes are done though Obsidian or determined by it’s hooks .
  • Switches to represent completion, after all processing and saving finishes .

Related feature requests (optional)

1 Like

I think there is some misunderstanding here. When a note is saved, it takes a fraction of a second to write it on disk. The visual indicator is just gonna flicker all the time.

Or do you think that it takes multiple seconds to save a note and you keep an eye on the saving indicator, so if the system crashes you know something happened?

Im C# programmer, ik the time ranges. Allow to disable it in Settings if you are worried about flickering. If system crashes, user will know whether the work was saved or attention needs to be put into reconstructing certain parts. Indication needs to guarantee that all operations were finished before it switches. ~0.2s delay between the switches also can be added to it (about the time to switch attention when finishing work), main thing is that there must be indication for all latency and structurally possible lag. You could also make added content/text grayed out until all operations succeed, but that is noticeably more expensive.

i’m not nearly as experienced as OP when it comes to the intricate details of file management and programming in general but i also feel that certain pressure points and resulting issues need to be addressed

i am not here for saving indicator specifically but some other internal troubleshooting method that oversees current stability of main app and switches off certain plugins or asks the user to reload obsidian while printing pertinent messages for the user when the system is overloaded or is lagging enough so that the core app no longer can save or index files

investigating this on a per-third party plugin is difficult and does not concern the developer team but the average user who is not aware of potential file content loss (which you can only see once you restart obsidian and have a version control program like git open) will continue to pile on the plugins in good faith not knowing potential trouble ahead

…and before we wave this off as ‘out-of-our-hands’, let me just say core functionality involving rendering large markdown tables is rather unfortunate and taxing on the system currently…

when i have more time, i will share my experiences more fully

I tried pasting content and closing the app, and Obsidian closed without caring to save the content. Even worse, when i tried to wait before the content fully appears in the editor, and closed after, it still didn’t save it fully.

So Obsidian not only closes without waiting for save operations, it even provides absolutely no way for user to know when their content finished saving.

image

I have no words to express this. Obsidian devs, you have a great idea, and are doing alot of right things, but im begging you, fix this fundamental flaw.

2 Likes

Obsidian does wait when closing. Perhaps the pasting process wasn’t finished.

Obsidian is not currently well suited to handle very large markdown file. Considering that whole bible is around 4MB and you are trying to work with 20MB file, you are gonna get a frustrating experience.

1 Like

That is simply not true, you also say like “pasting process” isn’t a data input which in turn the whole issue is about.

That is not the point, the latency depends on the system and it’s state, its not constant, just is often low enough.

Also, for those who aren’t very into tech. You won’t see any lag, if something happens to overload your hard drive, operation which causes you to loose data even with small amount of input, will look completely normal because all the visible parts are using RAM.

Not adding to the discussion but I’m surprised we’re still talking about this fundamental problem well over 3 years after I reported it here. There are lots of other threads too, here’s another one.

I’ve developed muscle memory to always pause for 2-3 seconds after pasting in Obsidian for the caches to be updated, and the data to be written.

Those bug reports that you linked are fixed.

Those specific bugs might be fixed. The situation is definitely better than in was prior to 1.3.2 when a more catastrophic version of this bug still existed.

But, based on the comments here, there seem to be related bugs that manifest with the same end result: the data you see in front of you when you quit Obsidian is not guaranteed to be present the next time you launch it.

1 Like

If there is a data loss, please open a bug report and follow the bug report template. We will try to figure out what happens.

I literally also reported a case with data loss, in this thread.

Please open a bug report in Bug reports and make sure you follow the bug report template and troubleshooting guide. Let’s leave this thread to the discussion about the save status indicator.