When I use obsidian with a bitlocker vault on USB, the vault gets removed from the selection screen when (temporary) not available. This results in the vault configuration to be removed, like the sync information, etc.
Use case: I sync my work notes but want them secure. So I put an obsidian vault on a USB stick with bitlocker.
I mount the USB stick by unlocking the bitlocked vault
I select my vault in Obsidian (in this case D:\Work)
I have to setup sync, disable safe mode, etc.
It sync perfectly once mounted
I restart my PC (or boot up the next day)
Obsidian starts up
The vault D:\Work is gone
And I have to start from step 2) again.
Desired outcome, leave unavailable vaults in vault selection screen (it might have a cross or if not available, canāt be selected), but deleting all config and cache once itās temporarily not found, is a bit destructive.
Same goes for a vault on a network share. If the share is unavailable (due to a network hickup), the vault info should also not be deleted.
Also my biggest issue that Iāve been having from the start and finally came here to report in case it wasnāt known.
Like Jorg, my vault is in a wise place for such a thing - in my case the vaultās on a RAIDed NAS. But for me itās about:
RAID redundancy
a single source of truth for access from both desktop PC and laptop
Adequate storage (6TB) for an efficient workflow keeping media assets directly in the vault and thus not suitable for syncing due to client storage sizes and speed.
So I find myself often redoing thing like putting quick access icons in the right panel again.
Iāve been meaning to deduce where this configuation information is stored and version control it for easy recovery. If youāve done similar, Jorg, LMK, and I will likewise.
Bump. It would be nice feature, when vault is placed in encrypted directory. Selecting the location every time I accidentally encrypt the vault before closing obsidian is annoying.
A bump from me too as Iāve got the same issue. Iāve just started testing Obsidian as a replacement for the aging and abandoned Keynote NF. Obsidian seems to have all I want, except for one small thing: with Keynote NF I had one public set of notes and one private set on a VeraCrypt drive. I tried doing the same with Obsidian and it works when everything is open, but once the private vault location is offline it is immediately removed from Obsidian, even when Iām only looking at the public one for a second. Iāve made direct shortcuts to both vaults, but even when I point straight to the private vault using a āobsidian://open?path=xxxxā link (I even tried linking to a file inside) it just pretends it isnāt there. Not sure if thereās anything else I can do, but it appears not.
It would be great if the encrypted vault could be pinned down or something, so it wouldnāt be forgotten. Simply being able to open an unknown vault via an obsidian:// link would make me more than happy too. Hope something like this could be added in the near future, so I can finally get rid of the old tool.
I am glad to see that this FR is marked as valuable. I would propose an operation along the lines of:
on any activity where a vaultās path is re-checked for existence:
e.g. opening Obsidian,
or listing vaults,
or opening a specific vault
if the path does not exist then,
instead of removing the vault from the list,
simply mark it as inactive
āgreyed outā or equivalent,
so that it cannot be selected for opening
Hopefully this logic is relatively straightforward, with relatively little impact on UIs, making it comparatively simple to code, test and release. Many thanks for listening to your user community
Hi,
Iāll second this request as in my case I use vaults locally but also on a SMB share, from MacOS.
This vault on the share, if not browsed before opening Obsidian, will disappear from the vault list.
The same will occur with vaults on USB sticks (encrypted or not).
I agree that having the link greyed out if unavailable would be nice, but at least do not automatically remove the vaults from the list when unavailable.
The clean up can be done manually by the user.
Thank you for considering this usecase in a near release.
Iād like to chime in with a related use-case. I keep some client related information, including an Obsidian vault, in a client-specific encrypted drive image on my local system (macOS, using a sparsebundle disk image). This volume isnāt always mounted, leading to a subset of problems documented in this thread:
The Obsidian vault switcher forgets about this vault if I ever open Obsidian (e.g. for my main vault) when the client volume isnāt mounted. As such, I have to navigate to it and āOpen folder as vaultā again each time.
The vault is treated as untrusted each and every time the above process happens.
Bumping this. I also keep a vault that I sync trough Obsidian Sync in a encrypted DMG on my macOS. Every time I unmount it and restart Obsidian the vault disappears. Meaning I have to re-add it, enable plug-ins again and re init the Obsidian sync.
@WhiteNoise, I have share my POV with @Jorg404 and @shimonko. As mentioned by them before, this is not the desired outcome and it most likely is a bug.
The list of vaults is a valuable data, and if something disappears from this list the vault may be forgotten in limbo.
In addition, having to re-add the missing vaults is really annoying and sometimes even time consuming when dealing with a long list of vaults in different places.
Iām just using a second volume on MacOS. So every now and then (especially if MacOS restarts itself after an OS update), my vault is gone. I have to re-add it, re-enable plugins, re-do all of the sync configuration, re-index all the things.
It is completely unexpected behavior, especially as the condition is temporary. All I would have to do is restart Obsidian, or manually open the vault (rather than having it open automaticallyā¦). When I restart the mac, none of my apps open automatically, so I avoid this state. When MacOS restarts itself, it resumes everything, and then this happens.
I love Obsidian, but this makes me spit fire for a good ten minutes.
I donāt fully understand why there is a desire for such aggressive cleanup.
However, if it really is an important design choice, then I think a simple config indicator could do the job. Iām not sure what words would be the most understandable, but something about the vault being located on removable media (or an external/secondary volume or mount or whatever) would cover all of the cases weāve listed. It could be checked/marked/whatever in the vault launcher, rather than having to bridge into the vault config itself. Further, if it is in the right click (or ...) menu for a vault in the launcher, it becomes something of an advanced option that you donāt have to club everyone over the head with (you donāt need to fuss with it until you know you need to fuss with it).