I seem to have lost almost all of my obsidian notes.
I had obsidian running on my phone and laptop. Sync was via the official service. I recently changed phones (android to android), which might be related considering the timing. I think obsidian updated recently too.
Now I have just three folders and half a dozen notes. Nothing else, which is really quite concerning.
Edit: I’ve just checked by old phone (disabled internet to prevent syncing). Lots more data there, although not sure if it is complete or not.
I don’t want to mess about with anything and make things worse. Any tips on where to start?
Replying to myself, but thought this might be useful if anyone has a similar issue in future.
What I think happened
- New device set-up installed obsidian
- Vault was created by migration process by empty (or maybe mostly empty, still not sure)
- This version was seen as newest and Obsidian sync pushed the empty version to other devices
- Panic ensued
How I resolved
I am still no certain I have 100% of data, but I think so. Luckily I had disabled wifi on the old device and removed the sim for other reasons, so this device didn’t sync. Plugged in USB cable, enabled file transfer and copied folder off old device to laptop and allowed obsidian sync to do the rest.
Surprising situation though. Doesn’t feel like this is how it is supposed to work. I am now going to start running a seperate backup of my “brain” periodically outside of the obsidian system.
Sorry to hear you went through this. No I don’t believe that’s how it’s supposed to work. It sounds like you created a new vault first. In the Sync a remote vault on another device, the steps say to choose “Open vault from Obsidian Sync”. And from that setup process, you’ll create and name a new local vault that will pull down from the remote version.
Sync tools are not intended to be backup tools! Keeping backups is an excellent and crucial idea. From that link above:
Prerequisites
Recommended: A backup system in place for your Obsidian files on your most-used device. A syncing service is not a backup.
