Lost Data

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Hey, I notice as I’m going through my income documents for tax purposes that some data seems to be missing from my vault.

As some extra detail, I previously had an issue with Obsidian where my vault had duplicate data - Reconcile a duplicate vault copy inside vault

In essence, I had a new folder inside my vault which contained… my vault.

I never took real action on resolving the duplicates. The only thing I did was write a script that went over all the files in the internal vault folder, compared them to the original folder and renamed the ones in the internal folder by prepending the text "DUPLICATE - " to the file name.

Today I notice that, for example, my tax return for 2023 is not present in my original vault folder, although I do have a “DUPLICATE - Tax Return 2023” file present. Meaning, the original file somehow got deleted. I have so far only identified this issue in my tax sub-folder. A lot of other files I spot-checked are still present in both original and duplicate form.

  1. Is there any straightforward way to figure out how this happened? I don’t seem to have access to my activity log from long ago.
  2. Am I dumb for using Obsidian (Sync) as the main place to store critical data like tax returns? It is perhaps naive of me to trust just one platform to not lose my data. I was thinking I should at a minimum add some form of backup
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  • First, oof. Sorry to hear that.

  • In that thread you mentioned you also had iCloud. And it sounds like you were going to fix that. Did you get all your devices off of iCloud? Mixing two cloud sync tools is a high probability reason that the data could have disappeared.

  • holroy and I both suggested backing up before doing any cleanup. Did you make a backup copy? Maybe that could contain some lost info. Or is there a chance the 2023 tax stuff was already gone before that previous thread?

  • It is not a good idea to use a syncing tool as your only source of backup. Sync tools are not intended for backups. The only reason they are better than nothing is because they have a window of history, but those windows can be short. But when you mix multiple sync tools, they can be worse than nothing because they fight each other.

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Thanks for replying again @rigmarole!!!

I disabled iCloud immediately after posting that thread.

Yeah, I made two backups. I just found it. Searching through it - I notice the original 2023 tax return was only present in the duplicated inner folder. I must have operated with both folders for a while before noticing the duplication and unintentionally created/saved files in the inner folder, without realizing. I just re-read my script and it seems like it just dumbly added “DUPLICATE -” rather than checking what’s actually duplicate. This explains it.

I never got around to reconciling both vaults by deleting data because I was too afraid to do it, so I just kept with it.

As of writing now, I wrote a new script to actually compare the contents and found 33 files that are in the copy folder but not in the base folder.

It seems like this duplicate has been going on since at least January 2023. It’s probably attributable to iCloud Sync. I’m fixing it now by backing up, carefully copying files that are not in the original folder, then comparing contents and etc.

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I’ll now proceed to set up some good backup strategy given this “incident”. Pretty good that no data was lost!!!

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Glad to hear it!