Hi, I had about six months worth of data that seems to be gone after v0.15.6 release. I tried quitting and restarting Obsidian, but no luck in finding the old files/vault.
What I’m trying to do
I used whatever tutorial vault came with Obsidian as my main vault.
I restarted my computer today, and I think it triggered the new version of Obsidian to install itself. Once I opened Obsidian after restarting my computer, the original Obsidian vault with all of my data was no longer there. Only a blank new vault.
Is there anything I can do to retrieve my old data?
you should not use the help vault/sandbox vault to store your data. There are warning and popup that tell you that that vault is temporary and is overwritten.
Thanks, @Dave73. That is a good thought. Unfortunately, I don’t so. I think I may be out of luck. Time to rebuild and not make the same mistake in using the sandbox vault.
@WhiteNoise, how often does the sandbox vault actually get used by users for anything other than reading tutorials when getting started? Given the wealth of online resources for Obsidian, I wonder if the sandbox vault is a vestigial limb of the earlier days of Obsidian where it made sense for helping with the onboarding experience for new users. I wonder if it makes sense to make the sandbox vault read-only so people like me don’t make critical errors and lose lots of data. Granted, that was a boneheaded move on my part
In the first releases of Obsidian there was a larger sandbox called Obsidian Help. That is now available only online at help.obsidian.md. Nowadays, the sandbox vault is just a short quick start guide and used for troubleshooting.
Ha, that would definitely be wild. I’ve certainly restarted my computer many times over the last six months. Today was the first time this happened where the Obsidian vault I was using didn’t reload my existing data.
I had a similar problem. My vault was set up in Obsidian Help. I didn’t have a problem with that until recently, I assume also because of the recent update. Luckily, in my case after a short panic I found the old vault in User\AppData\Roaming\obsidian\Obsidian Help (windows). Obsidian doesn’t seem to remember this file location, and would ask me to open a vault whenever I restarted the app. So I moved my vaults to a different folder.
Dear support team: In the old Obsidian Help vault, there doesn’t seem to be a warning like the one in the screenshot above. It would be helpful to get a notice before our vaults disappear. @overZellis: Maybe, hopefully, you might find your old vault as well. Searching for a folder called “.obsidian” might help.
@Pawafallz, @tunkall – I’m glad you both were able to retrieve your data. @bpagano helped me to get auto-backups setup using Keyboard Maestro with my personal Dropbox. I intend when I come up for air from work to share back to the community here a step-by-step guide on using Keyboard Maestro to setup auto-backups. More soon, and thank you @bpagano for your help!
As promised, I wanted to share back how I set up automated backups with the help of @bpagano. I hope this helps! I have a Mac, so this is specifically how I set this up on my Mac.
If you’d like to be able to trigger a backup with a hotkey, add a trigger for Hot Key Trigger
Click “New Action” and select “Set Variable to Text”
Set the variable to whatever name you’d like. I made mine “BackupDate”
In the “to” field, set this to: %ICUDateTime%yyyyMMddhhmm%
Click “New Action” and select “Copy a File”
In the “Copy” field, enter whatever the file path is for your Obsidian vault. To do this, go to your Finder, navigate to your Obsidian folder, right-click and hold down the “option” key, select “Copy as Pathname”. For me this was: /Users/zackellis/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~md~obsidian/Documents/General. I don’t remember why, but it looks like I got rid of “/Users/zackellis” as a part of this path.
Under the “to” field, add a folder path for your storage place of choice. I am syncing to my personal Dropbox account in a folder I labeled “Obsidian”. I made the to field: ~/Dropbox (Personal)/Obsidian/General%Variable%BackupDate%
The variable in the path uses the BackupDate variable down to the minute so that I can see which vault I am backing up (my vault titled General) and the time it was synced.
Hit “Record” in the bottom right, and that’s it! You now have a backup running every 6 hours (or whenever you hit the keystroke to force the backup).