This morning I started Obsidian and I was working on some notes, basically continuing things I worked on last evening. After about one hour I had occasion to visit the settings. While there I ran the check for community plugin updates There were several… four I think. Since I had checked regularly (I checked just yesterday or the day before) I was surprised at the number because I usually only see one or two at the most. I choose to run all. I am not sure but I know one was Commander.
I cannot remember the others.
I exited settings and opened another note. Obsidian stopped working and crashed. When I started Obsidian up again it asked for a Vault to open. It was strange, but I did it. Opened my only Vault. All notes are there but Obsidian is set to defaults ( no plugins, setups, themes, shortcuts…nothing. I had all my notes, no community plugins, and standard new vault default settings.
Fortunately, I had just documented many of my settings and plugins just yesterday. Still, I will need several hours to reconfigure everything.
Is there a way to save settings to an external file?
Sorry to hear that.
All of your vault’s settings are stored in the .obsidian folder right under the root of the vault (unless you changed the “Override config folder” setting).
So, you can backup the settings by saving .obsidian to somewhere else. Personally, I use git (automatically executed every 2 hours via the Obsidian Git plugin) to save my vault including .obsidian folder to a private repository on GitHub.
If you have a backup of .obsidian folder, you will be able to recover the settings by simply copying it to your vault.
The question is: where do you keep that Obsidian vault? It sounds like it is in a cloud folder (iCloud/OneDrive/GoogleDrive/etc.) and the cloud software decided to “evict” the .obsidian folder to the cloud for whatever reason. Just a guess and maybe not the case here, but this scenario happens often.
Thanx ush and ariehen… Yes, I am using iCloud to sync my vault. It seems to work very well.
After receiving your way fast responses, I went to look for hidden files… Those in MacOS that are prefixed with a period (.). Looking in the finder I can see all the settings and plugins that I was using, but they still are not being accessed by my Obsidian application.
How do I get Obsidian to again access this hidden .obsidian directory?
Also, I noticed two other hidden items there also. Please tell me a bit about these. They are a folder titled .smart-connections and a file titled .md. When I tried to look at .md it just appeared to be blank.
Thanx, I appreciate your input… However, the version of MacOS I am running (Sonoma 14.0) does not have a selection for ‘Download Now’ when the file is right-clicked.
I can cycle through all the sub-directories and files, so I think the .obsidian folder is already downloaded… But I don’t know that for sure.
I have tried to close and open the Obsidian application… Still no settings/plugins.
Do you have any other ideas as to how I can get Obsidian to ‘see’ and use the .obsidian directory?
Here’s what I was seeing: The .obsidian directory was located in the same directory as the Vault directory. I have no idea how this happened as I haven’t been moving Obsidian files around other than within Obsidian itself. At any rate, I noticed that when I created a new vault to work on starting over the new vault had its own .obsidian directory located under the new vault directory.
Having seen this I copied the Obsidian/.obsidan directory to Obsidian/Vault/.obsidian and everything I had done before this morning returned to good.
I will be taking steps to make a periodic backup copy of the .obsidian directory!
